Читать книгу Lafcadio Hearn - Nina H. Kennard - Страница 6

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"Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the soul. … What more, indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates—imaging sky, and land, and life—filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings—and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him? … In each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it—sun, moon, and stars—earth, sky, and sea—and mind and man, and space and time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker shapes for ever."

On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio, Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura."

The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and remarkable figures of the end of the last century.

Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.

On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock—mixture of Saxon and Celt—which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's grandfather—as has been stated—came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace, and about the same time—as recognition for services done, we conclude—became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of Westmeath.

A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County Waterford—has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev. Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship with the County Westmeath portion of the family.

As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records certainly of several Daniel Hearns—it is the Christian name that furnishes the clue—occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire and Somersetshire.

In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally "cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the Herons—pronounced Hearn—to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights."

Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'—heron with wings down—for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries, are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the various modifications of the word—namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern, Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic languages it is irren, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. Hirn, the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin errare and Frankish errant, with the Celtic err names are related, though the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or gipsies, is referred to.

I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible sign of Romany descent.

Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element—quite distinct from the Japanese type—is so strong as to have impressed itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may, on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India.

On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek; Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand, maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands. The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian, half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes, migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original Venetian Maltese.

"We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite addition—the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us, stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested themselves—the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.

From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.

Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew—"Veritable blunderers," as Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world."

Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother. I mean 'force' … I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of soul … very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the 'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular directions—guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a resemblance in his children by two different mothers—and I want so much to find out if the resemblance is also psychological."

Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849 infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor, additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands.

Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore, necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep; the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.

But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways. Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use.

Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress. A lock of hair was enclosed:—

"Dearest and nearest to my heart,

Thou art fairer than the silver moon,

And I trust to see thee soon."

There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with the following:—

"Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love

And evermore will beat for thee!!"

"Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.

Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo, but communication between the islands was frequent.

As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland, of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount of friction.

Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island, excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends." Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.

Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world—the world that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty—impressed itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court—his mother, presumably—chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and temples of the ancient Leucadia. … Awakening, he heard, in the night, the moaning of the real sea—the muttering of the Tide of the Returning Ghosts.

Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta. How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.

Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old. He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard. Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"—indeed, all his belongings—were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task entrusted to him.

Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript; the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a text from the Gospels and Epistles.

Because of the political and religious animus existing between Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England. All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation, thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate opinions.

On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7 o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady! Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear, beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us." Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs. Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later, in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to perfectly harmless actions and statements.

Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son, having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major portion of the capital of Ireland.

The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory. She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe castigation.

When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them. In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.

When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another time, another heaven.

Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers, after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated, with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as his own.

"My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark, with large black eyes—very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap it. I slapped it—simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences."

The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane—"Sally Brenane," Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin Brenane—a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means—and had adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak, bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband.

In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands, something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes, accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them.

Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman, when she went for her daily drive.

In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies. Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton."

The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of storm!

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.

What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary. "October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay.

An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now, whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person," Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea.

Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred feet under the dinner-table.