Lafcadio Hearn

Patricio Lafcadio Carlos Hearne (27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904) was a Greek-born journalist, author and academic. He was brought up in Ireland and lived for many years in the United States before moving to Japan, taking Japanese citizenship, and adopting the name Yakumo Koizumi.

Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice; it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness.

My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter – with infinite subtlety – spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go, – and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; – and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them.

It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time.

Quotes

• How sweet Japanese woman is! All the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be concentrated in her.
  • Letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, cited from Basil Hall Chamberlain Things Japanese (London: Kegan Paul, 1891) p. 453.

• Whatever doubts or vexations one has in Japan, it is only necessary to ask one's self: "Well, who are the best people to live with?"
  • Letter to Ernest Fenollosa, August 1891, cited from Elizabeth Bisland (ed.) Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922) vol. 2, p. 160.

• Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice; it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness.
  • "Of the Eternal Feminine" (1893), cited from Out of the East; and, Kokoro (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922) p. 79.

• My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter – with infinite subtlety – spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go, – and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; – and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them.
  • Letter to Ernest Fenollosa, December 1898, cited from Elizabeth Bisland (ed.) Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923) vol. 3, p. 147.

• Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.
  • Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn.

• They are hideous Golgothas, these old intermural cemeteries of ours. In other cities cemeteries are beautiful with all that the art of the gardener and sculptor can give....There the horror is masked. Here it glares at us with empty sockets. The tombs are fissured, or have caved in, or have crumbled down into shapeless bricks and mortar...[and] crawfish undermine the walls to feast upon what is hidden within.
  • Lafcadio Hearn, Creole Sketches, ed. Charles Woodward Hutsun (1880; Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1924), p. 136. Lafcadio Hearn referring to the cemeteries in New Orleans.

• With the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, old forms of thought crumbled; new ideas everywhere arose to take the place of worn-out dogmas; and we now have the spectacle of a general intellectual movement in directions strangely parallel with Oriental philosophy. The unprecedented rapidity and multiformity of scientific progress during the last fifty years could not have failed to provoke an equally unprecedented intellectual quickening among the non-scientific.
  That the highest and most complex organisms have been developed from the lowest and simplest; that a single physical basis of life is the substance of the whole living world; that no line of separation can be drawn between the animal and vegetable; that the difference between life and non-life is only a difference of degree, not of kind; that matter is not less incomprehensible than mind, while both are but varying manifestations of one and the same unknown reality – these have already become the commonplaces of the new philosophy.
  • Evolution and Ethics, p. 61, ed. 1894 – Kokoro, Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, pp. 237-39 london, (1896)

• After the first recognition even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict that the recognition of psychical evolution could not be indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old dogma to keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And today for the student of scientific psychology the idea of pre-existence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of fact, proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery quite as plausible as any other.
  "None but very hasty thinkers," wrote the late Professor Huxley, "will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.”
  • Evolution and Ethics, p. 61, ed. 1894 – Kokoro, Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, pp. 237-39 london, (1896)

Out of the East

Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (Cosimo, Inc., 2006).

• It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.
  • pp. 156–7.

Books and Habits

Quotations are cited from John Erskine (ed.) Books and Habits: From the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1921).

• Any idealism is a proper subject for art.
  • p. 22.

• The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.
  • p. 23.

• But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness of being truly loved.
  • p. 70.

About

• Mr Hearn began really to count as a writer only when his Hellenic qualities of mind, stunted at first by the conditions of life in North America, were at last developed among a people distinguished by somewhat of that instinctive feeling for beauty which formed an incomparable element in the genius of ancient Greece. His æsthetic sense luxuriated in a land where fineness of taste is still a common characteristic. Through the gate of their art he entered, not only into the ways of life of the Japanese, but into their moods and their religion.
  • Edward Wright, "The Romance of the Outlands". The Quarterly Review 203: 47–72. July 1905, p. 63

• To denounce Hearn is the same thing as a denunciation of Japan. Lafcadio Hearn was as Japanese as haiku.
  • Yone Noguchi Lafcadio Hearn in Japan (London: Elkin Mathews, 1910) p. 20.

• He is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm.
  • Malcolm Cowley, in Henry Goodman (ed.) The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Citadel Press, 1949) p. 15.

• Your information is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travellers. It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of a Lafcadio Hearn or that of the author of "The Web of Indian Life" enlivens the Oriental darkness with the torch of our own sentiments.
  • Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906)