Lafcadio Hearn was born on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1850. He was a native of the Ionian Isles, the place of his birth being the Island of Santa Maura, which is commonly called in modern Greek Levkas, or Lefcada, a corruption of the name of the old Leucadia, which was famous as the place of Sappho’s self-destruction. This island is separated from the western coast of Greece by a narrow strait; the neck of land which joined it to the mainland having been cut through by the Corinthians seven centuries before Christ. To this day it remains deeply wooded, and scantily populated, with sparse vineyards and olive groves clinging to the steep sides of the mountains overlooking the blue Ionian sea. The child Lafcadio may have played in his early years among the high-set, half-obliterated ruins of the Temple of Apollo, from whence offenders were cast down with multitudes of birds tied to their limbs, that perchance the beating of a thousand wings might break the violence of the fall, and so rescue them from the last penalty of expiation.

In this place of old tragedies and romance the child was born into a life always to be shadowed by tragedy and romance to an extent almost fantastic in our modern workaday world. This wild, bold background, swimming in the half-tropical blue of Greek sea and sky, against which the boy first discerned the vague outlines of his conscious life, seems to have silhouetted itself behind all his later memories and prepossessions, and through whatever dark or squalid scenes his wanderings led, his heart was always filled by dreams and longings for soaring outlines, and the blue, “which is the colour of the idea of the divine, the colour pantheistic, the colour ethical.”

Long years afterward, in the “Dream of a Summer Day,” he says:—

“I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before, I cannot tell, but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world—almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer.... The sea was alive and used to talk—and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived among the peaks, I have dreamed for a moment the same wind was blowing—but it was only a remembrance.

“Also in that place the clouds were wonderful and of colours for which there are no names at all,—colours that used to make me hungry and thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer than these days,—and every day there were new pleasures and new wonders for me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done, and there fell the great hush of light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.”

A strange mingling of events and of race-forces had brought the boy into being.

Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, of the 76th Foot, came of an old Dorsetshire family in which there was a tradition of gipsy blood—a tradition too dim and ancient now to be verified, though Hearn is an old Romany name in the west of England, and the boy Lafcadio bore in his hand all his life that curious “thumb-print” upon the palm, which is said to be the invariable mark of Romany descent. The first of the Hearns to pass over into Ireland went as private chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant in 1693, and being later appointed Dean of Cashel, settled permanently in West Meath. From the ecclesiastical loins there appears to have sprung a numerous race of soldiers, for Dr. Hearn’s father and seven uncles served under Wellington in Spain. The grandfather of Lafcadio rose during the Peninsula Campaign to the position of lieutenant-colonel of the 43d regiment, and commanded his regiment in the battle of Vittoria. Later he married Elizabeth Holmes, a kinswoman of Sir Robert Holmes, and of Edmund Holmes the poet, another member of her family being Rice Holmes, the historian of the Indian Mutiny. Dr. Charles Hearn, the father of Lafcadio, was her eldest son, and another son was Richard, who was one of the Barbizon painters and an intimate friend of Jean FranÇois Millet.

It was in the late ’40’s, when England still held the Ionian Isles, that the 76th Foot was ordered to Greece, and Surgeon-Major Hearn accompanied his regiment to do garrison duty on the island of Cerigo. Apparently not long after his arrival he made the acquaintance of Rosa Cerigote, whose family is said to have been of old and honourable Greek descent. Photographs of the young surgeon represent him as a handsome man, with the flowing side-whiskers so valued at that period, and with a bold profile and delicate waist. A passionate love affair ensued between the beautiful Greek girl and the handsome Irishman, but the connection was violently opposed by the girl’s brothers, the native bitterness toward the English garrison being as intense as was the sentiment in the South against the Northern army of occupation immediately after the American Civil War. The legend goes that the Cerigote men—there was hot blood in the family veins—waylaid and stabbed the Irishman, leaving him for dead. The girl, it is said, with the aid of a servant, concealed him in a barn and nursed him back to life, and after his recovery eloped with her grateful lover and married him by the Greek rites in Santa Maura. The first child died immediately after birth, and the boy, Lafcadio, was the second child; taking his name from the Greek name of the island, Lefcada. Another son, James, three years later in Cephalonia, was the fruit of this marriage, so romantically begun and destined to end so tragically.

When England ceded the Ionian Isles to Greece Dr. Hearn returned with his family to Dublin, pausing, perhaps, for a while at Malta, for in a letter written during the last years of his life Lafcadio says: “I am almost sure of having been in Malta as a child. My father told me queer things about the old palaces of the knights, and a story of a monk who on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railing with green paint.”

The two boys were at this time aged six and three. It was inevitable, no doubt, that the young wife, who had never mastered the English tongue, though she spoke, as did the children, Italian and Romaic, should have regretted the change from her sunlit island to the dripping Irish skies and grey streets of Dublin, nor can it be wondered at that, an exile among aliens in race, speech, and faith, there should have soon grown up misunderstandings and disputes. The unhappy details have died into silence with the passage of time, but the wife seems to have believed herself repudiated and betrayed, and the marriage being eventually annulled, she fled to Smyrna with a Greek cousin who had come at her call, leaving the two children with the father. This cousin she afterwards married and her children knew her no more. The father also married again, and the boy Lafcadio being adopted by Dr. Hearn’s aunt, a Mrs. Brenane, and removing with her to Wales, never again saw either his father or his brother.[1]

The emotions are not hard to guess at of a passionate, sensitive boy of seven, suddenly flung by the stormy emotions of his elders out of the small warm circle of his narrow sphere. To a young child the relations of its parents and the circle of the home seem as fundamental and eternal as the globe itself, and the sudden ravishment of all the bases of his life make his footing amid the ties and affections of the world forever after timid and uncertain.

A boy of less sensitive fibre might in time have forgotten these shocks, but the eldest son of Charles Hearn and Rosa Cerigote was destined to suffer always because of the violent rending of their ties. From this period seems to have dated his strange distrusts, his unconquerable terror of the potentialities which he suspected as lurking beneath the frankest exterior, and his constant, morbid dread of betrayal and abandonment by even his closest friends.

Whatever of fault there may have been on his mother’s part, his vague memories of her were always tender and full of yearning affection.

To the brother he never saw he wrote, when he was a man, “And you do not remember that dark and beautiful face—with large, brown eyes like a wild deer’s—that used to bend above your cradle? You do not remember the voice which told you each night to cross your fingers after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words—?? t? ???a t?? ?at??? ?a? t?? ???? ?a? t?? ????? ??e?at??, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’? She made, or had made, three little wounds upon you when a baby—to place you, according to her childish faith, under the protection of those three powers, but specially that of Him for whom alone the Nineteenth Century still feels some reverence—the Lord and Giver of Life.... We were all very dark as children, very passionate, very odd-looking, and wore gold rings in our ears. Have you not the marks yet?...

“When I saw your photograph I felt all my blood stir,—and I thought, ‘Here is this unknown being, in whom the soul of my mother lives,—who must have known the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as I! Will he tell me of them?’ There was another Self,—would that Self interpret This?

“For This has always been mysterious. Were I to use the word ‘Soul’ in its limited and superannuated sense as the spirit of the individual instead of the ghost of a race,—I should say it had always seemed to me as if I had two souls: each pulling in different ways. One of these represented the spirit of mutiny—impatience of all restraint, hatred of all control, weariness of everything methodical and regular, impulses to love or hate without a thought of consequences. The other represented pride and persistence;—it had little power to use the reins before I was thirty.... Whatever there is of good in me came from that dark race-soul of which we know so little. My love of right, my hate of wrong;—my admiration for what is beautiful or true;—my capacity for faith in man or woman;—my sensitiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever little success I have,—even that language-power whose physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us,—came from Her.... It is the mother who makes us,—makes at least all that makes the nobler man: not his strength or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to love. And I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”

Mrs. Brenane, into whose hands the child thus passed, was the widow of a wealthy Irishman, by whom she had been converted to Romanism, and like all converts she was “more loyal than the King.” The divorce and remarriage of her nephew incurred her bitterest resentment; she not only insisted upon a complete separation from the child, but did not hesitate to speak her mind fully to the boy, who always retained the impressions thus early instilled. In one of his letters he speaks of his father’s “rigid face, and steel-steady eyes,” and says: “I can remember seeing father only five times. He was rather taciturn, I think. I remember he wrote me a long letter from India—all about serpents and tigers and elephants—printed in Roman letters with a pen, so that I could read it easily.... I remember my father taking me up on horseback when coming into the town with his regiment. I remember being at a dinner with a number of men in red coats, and crawling about under the table among their legs.” And elsewhere he declares, “I think there is nothing of him in me, either physically or mentally.” A mistake of prejudice this; the Hearns of the second marriage bearing the most striking likeness to the elder half-brother, having the same dark skins, delicate, aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit figures. The family type is unusual and distinctive, with some racial alignment not easy to define except by the indefinite term “exotic;” showing no trace of either its English origin or Irish residence.

Of the next twelve years of Lafcadio Hearn’s life there exists but meagre record. The little dark-eyed, dark-faced, passionate boy with the wound in his heart and the gold rings in his ears—speaking English but stammeringly, mingled with Italian and Romaic—seems to have been removed at about his seventh year to Wales, and from this time to have visited Ireland but occasionally. Of his surroundings during the most impressionable period of his life it is impossible to reconstruct other than shadowy outlines. Mrs. Brenane was old; was wealthy; and lived surrounded by eager priests and passionate converts.

In “Kwaidan” there is a little story called “Hi-Mawari,” which seems a glimpse of this period:—

Recorded in this artless story are the most vivid suggestions of the nature of the boy who was to be father of the man Lafcadio Hearn, the minute observation, the quivering sensitiveness to tones, to expressions, to colours and odours; profound passions of tenderness; and—more than all—his nascent interest in the ghostly and the weird. How great a part this latter had already assumed in his young life one gathers from one of the autobiographic papers found after his death—half a dozen fragments of recollection, done exquisitely in his small beautiful handwriting, and enclosed each in fine Japanese envelopes. Characteristically they concern themselves but little with what are called “facts”—though he would have been the last to believe that emotions produced by events were not after all the most salient of human facts.

These records of impressions left upon his nature by the conditions surrounding his early years open a strange tremulous light upon the inner life of the lonely, ardent child, and from the shadows created by that light one can reconstruct perhaps more clearly the shapes about him by which those shadows were cast than would have been possible with more direct vision of them.

The first of the fragments is called

MY GUARDIAN ANGEL

What I am going to relate must have happened when I was nearly six years old—at which time I knew a great deal about ghosts, and very little about gods.

For the best of possible reasons I then believed in ghosts and in goblins,—because I saw them, both by day and by night. Before going to sleep I would always cover up my head to prevent them from looking at me; and I used to scream when I felt them pulling at the bedclothes. And I could not understand why I had been forbidden to talk about these experiences.

But of religion I knew almost nothing. The old lady who had adopted me intended that I should be brought up a Roman Catholic; but she had not yet attempted to give me any definite religious instruction. I had been taught to say a few prayers; but I repeated them only as a parrot might have done. I had been taken, without knowing why, to church; and I had been given many small pictures edged with paper lace,—French religious prints,—of which I did not understand the meaning. To the wall of the room in which I slept there was suspended a Greek icon,—a miniature painting in oil of the Virgin and Child, warmly coloured, and protected by a casing of fine metal that left exposed only the olive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. But I fancied that the brown Virgin represented my mother—whom I had almost completely forgotten—and the large-eyed Child, myself. I had been taught to pronounce the invocation, In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost;—but I did not know what the words signified. One of the appellations, however, seriously interested me: and the first religious question that I remember asking was a question about the Holy Ghost. It was the word “Ghost,” of course, that had excited my curiosity; and I put the question with fear and trembling because it appeared to relate to a forbidden subject. The answer I cannot clearly recollect;—but it gave me an idea that the Holy Ghost was a white ghost, and not in the habit of making faces at small people after dusk. Nevertheless the name filled me with vague suspicion, especially after I had learned to spell it correctly, in a prayer-book; and I discovered a mystery and an awfulness unspeakable in the capital G. Even now the aspect of that formidable letter will sometimes revive those dim and fearsome imaginings of childhood.

I suppose that I had been allowed to remain so long in happy ignorance of dogma because I was a nervous child. Certainly it was for no other reason that those about me had been ordered not to tell me either ghost-stories or fairy-tales, and that I had been strictly forbidden to speak of ghosts. But in spite of such injunctions I was doomed to learn, quite unexpectedly, something about goblins much grimmer than any which had been haunting me. This undesirable information was given to me by a friend of the family,—a visitor.

Our visitors were few; and their visits, as a rule, were brief. But we had one privileged visitor who came regularly each autumn to remain until the following spring,—a convert,—a tall girl who looked like some of the long angels in my French pictures. At that time I must have been incapable of forming certain abstract conceptions; but she gave me the idea of Sorrow as a dim something that she personally represented. She was not a relation; but I was told to call her “Cousin Jane.” For the rest of the household she was simply “Miss Jane;” and the room that she used to occupy, upon the third floor, was always referred to as “Miss Jane’s room.” I heard it said that she passed her summers in some convent, and that she wanted to become a nun. I asked why she did not become a nun; and I was told that I was too young to understand.

She seldom smiled; and I never heard her laugh; she had some secret grief of which only my aged protector knew the nature. Although handsome, young, and rich, she was always severely dressed in black. Her face, notwithstanding its constant look of sadness, was beautiful; her hair, a dark chestnut, was so curly that, however smoothed or braided, it always seemed to ripple; and her eyes, rather deeply-set, were large and black. Also I remember that her voice, though musical, had a peculiar metallic tone which I did not like.

Yet she could make that voice surprisingly tender when speaking to me. Usually I found her kind,—often more than kind; but there were times when she became so silent and sombre that I feared to approach her. And even in her most affectionate moods—even when caressing me—she remained strangely solemn. In such moments she talked to me about being good, about being truthful, about being obedient, about trying “to please God.” I detested these exhortations. My old relative had never talked to me in that way. I did not fully understand; I only knew that I was being found fault with, and I suspected that I was being pitied.

And one morning (I remember that it was a gloomy winter morning),—losing patience at last during one of these tiresome admonitions, I boldly asked Cousin Jane to tell me why I should try to please God more than to please anybody else. I was then sitting on a little stool at her feet. Never can I forget the look that darkened her features as I put the question. At once she caught me up, placed me upon her lap, and fixed her black eyes upon my face with a piercing earnestness that terrified me, as she exclaimed:—

“My child!—is it possible that you do not know who God is?”

“No,” I answered in a choking whisper.

“God!—God who made you!—God who made the sun and the moon and the sky,—and the trees and the beautiful flowers,—everything!... You do not know?”

I was too much alarmed by her manner to reply.

“You do not know,” she went on, “that God made you and me?—that God made your father and your mother and everybody?... You do not know about Heaven and Hell?”

I do not remember all the rest of her words; I can recall with distinctness only the following:—“and send you down to Hell to burn alive in fire for ever and ever!... Think of it!—always burning, burning, burning!—screaming and burning! screaming and burning!—never to be saved from that pain of fire!... You remember when you burned your finger at the lamp?—Think of your whole body burning,—always, always, always burning!—for ever and ever!”

I can still see her face as in the instant of that utterance,—the horror upon it, and the pain.... Then she suddenly burst into tears, and kissed me, and left the room.

From that time I detested Cousin Jane,—because she had made me unhappy in a new and irreparable way. I did not doubt what she had said; but I hated her for having said it,—perhaps especially for the hideous way in which she had said it. Even now her memory revives the dull pain of the childish hypocrisy with which I endeavoured to conceal my resentment. When she left us in the spring, I hoped that she would soon die,—so that I might never see her face again.

But I was fated to meet her again under strange circumstances. I am not sure whether it was in the latter part of the summer that I next saw her, or early in the autumn; I remember only that it was in the evening and that the weather was still pleasantly warm. The sun had set; but there was a clear twilight, full of soft colour; and in that twilight-time I happened to be on the lobby of the third floor,—all by myself.

... I do not know why I had gone up there alone;—perhaps I was looking for some toy. At all events I was standing in the lobby, close to the head of the stairs, when I noticed that the door of Cousin Jane’s room seemed to be ajar. Then I saw it slowly opening. The fact surprised me because that door—the farthest one of three opening upon the lobby—was usually locked. Almost at the same moment Cousin Jane herself, robed in her familiar black dress came out of the room, and advanced towards me—but with her head turned upwards and sidewards, as if she were looking at something on the lobby-wall, close to the ceiling. I cried out in astonishment, “Cousin Jane!”—but she did not seem to hear. She approached slowly, still with her head so thrown back that I could see nothing of her face above the chin; then she walked directly past me into the room nearest the stairway,—a bedroom of which the door was always left open by day. Even as she passed I did not see her face,—only her white throat and chin, and the gathered mass of her beautiful hair. Into the bedroom I ran after her, calling out, “Cousin Jane! Cousin Jane!” I saw her pass round the foot of a great four-pillared bed, as if to approach the window beyond it; and I followed her to the other side of the bed. Then, as if first aware of my presence, she turned; and I looked up, expecting to meet her smile.... She had no face. There was only a pale blur instead of a face. And even as I stared, the figure vanished. It did not fade; it simply ceased to be,—like the shape of a flame blown out. I was alone in that darkening room,—and afraid, as I had never before been afraid. I did not scream; I was much too frightened to scream;—I only struggled to the head of the stairs, and stumbled, and fell,—rolling over and over down to the next lobby. I do not remember being hurt; the stair-carpets were soft and very thick. The noise of my tumble brought immediate succour and sympathy. But I did not say a word about what I had seen; I knew that I should be punished if I spoke of it....

Now some weeks or months later, at the beginning of the cold season, the real Cousin Jane came back one morning to occupy that room upon the third floor. She seemed delighted to meet me again; and she caressed me so fondly that I felt ashamed of my secret dismay at her return. On the very same day she took me out with her for a walk, and bought me cakes, toys, pictures,—a multitude of things,—carrying all the packages herself. I ought to have been grateful, if not happy. But the generous shame that her caresses had awakened was already gone; and that memory of which I could speak to no one—least of all to her—again darkened my thoughts as we walked together. This Cousin Jane who was buying me toys, and smiling, and chatting, was only, perhaps, the husk of another Cousin Jane that had no face.... Before the brilliant shops, among the crowds of happy people, I had nothing to fear. But afterwards—after dark—might not the Inner disengage herself from the other, and leave her room, and glide to mine with chin upturned, as if staring at the ceiling?... Twilight fell before we reached home; and Cousin Jane had ceased to speak or smile. No doubt she was tired. But I noticed that her silence and her sternness had begun with the gathering of the dusk,—and a chill crept over me.

Nevertheless, I passed a merry evening with my new toys,—which looked very beautiful under the lamplight. Cousin Jane played with me until bed-time. Next morning she did not appear at the breakfast-table—I was told that she had taken a bad cold, and could not leave her bed. She never again left it alive; and I saw her no more,—except in dreams. Owing to the dangerous nature of the consumption that had attacked her, I was not allowed even to approach her room.... She left her money to somebody in the convent which she used to visit, and her books to me.

If, at that time, I could have dared to speak of the other Cousin Jane, somebody might have thought proper—in view of the strange sequel—to tell me the natural history of such apparitions. But I could not have believed the explanation. I understood only that I had seen; and because I had seen I was afraid.

And the memory of that seeing disturbed me more than ever, after the coffin of Cousin Jane had been carried away. The knowledge of her death had filled me, not with sorrow, but with terror. Once I had wished that she were dead. And the wish had been fulfilled—but the punishment was yet to come! Dim thoughts, dim fears—enormously older than the creed of Cousin Jane—awakened within me, as from some prenatal sleep,—especially a horror of the dead as evil beings, hating mankind.... Such horror exists in savage minds, accompanied by the vague notion that character is totally transformed or stripped by death,—that those departed, who once caressed and smiled and loved, now menace and gibber and hate.... What power, I asked myself in dismay, could protect me from her visits? I had not yet ceased to believe in the God of Cousin Jane; but I doubted whether he would or could do anything for me. Moreover, my creed had been greatly shaken by the suspicion that Cousin Jane had always lied. How often had she not assured me that I could not see ghosts or evil spirits! Yet the Thing that I had seen was assuredly her inside-self,—the ghost of the goblin of her,—and utterly evil. Evidently she hated me: she had lured me into a lonesome room for the sole purpose of making me hideously afraid.... And why had she hated me thus before she died?—was it because she knew that I hated her,—that I had wished her to die? Yet how did she know?—could the ghost of her see, through blood and flesh and bone, into the miserable little ghost of myself?

... Anyhow, she had lied.... Perhaps everybody else had lied. Were all the people that I knew—the warm people, who walked and laughed in the light—so much afraid of the Things of the Night that they dared not tell the truth?... To none of these questions could I find a reply. And there began for me a second period of black faith,—a faith of unutterable horror, mingled with unutterable doubt.

I was not then old enough to read serious books: it was only in after years that I could learn the worth of Cousin Jane’s bequest,—which included a full set of the “Waverley Novels;” the works of Miss Edgeworth; Martin’s Milton—a beautiful copy, in tree-calf; Langhorne’s Plutarch; Pope’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey;” Byron’s “Corsair” and “Lara,”—in the old red-covered Murray editions; some quaint translations of the “Arabian Nights,” and Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding”! I cannot recall half of the titles; but I remember one fact that gratefully surprised me: there was not a single religious book in the collection.... Cousin Jane was a convert: her literary tastes, at least, were not of Rome.

Those who knew her history are dust.... How often have I tried to reproach myself for hating her. But even now in my heart a voice cries bitterly to the ghost of her: “Woe! woe!—thou didst destroy it,—the beautiful world!”

In the paper entitled “Idolatry” he reveals, as by some passing reflection in a mirror, how his little pagan Greek soul was hardening itself thus early against the strong fingers endeavouring to shape the tendencies of his thought into forms entirely alien to it.

IDOLATRY

The early Church did not teach that the gods of the heathen were merely brass and stone. On the contrary she accepted them as real and formidable personalities—demons who had assumed divinity to lure their worshippers to destruction. It was in reading the legends of that Church, and the lives of her saints, that I obtained my first vague notions of the pagan gods.

I then imagined those gods to resemble in some sort the fairies and the goblins of my nursery-tales, or the fairies in the ballads of Sir Walter Scott. Goblins and their kindred interested me much more than the ugly Saints of the Pictorial Church History,—much more than even the slender angels of my French religious prints, who unpleasantly reminded me of Cousin Jane. Besides, I could not help suspecting all the friends of Cousin Jane’s God, and feeling a natural sympathy with his enemies,—whether devils, goblins, fairies, witches, or heathen deities. To the devils indeed—because I supposed them stronger than the rest—I had often prayed for help and friendship; very humbly at first, and in great fear of being too grimly answered,—but afterwards with words of reproach on finding that my condescensions had been ignored.

But in spite of their indifference, my sympathy with the enemies of Cousin Jane’s God steadily strengthened; and my interest in all the spirits that the Church History called evil, especially the heathen gods, continued to grow. And at last one day I discovered, in one unexplored corner of our library, several beautiful books about art,—great folio books containing figures of gods and of demi-gods, athletes and heroes, nymphs and fauns and nereids, and all the charming monsters—half-man, half-animal—of Greek mythology.

How my heart leaped and fluttered on that happy day! Breathless I gazed; and the longer that I gazed the more unspeakably lovely those faces and forms appeared. Figure after figure dazzled, astounded, bewitched me. And this new delight was in itself a wonder,—also a fear. Something seemed to be thrilling out of those pictured pages,—something invisible that made me afraid. I remembered stories of the infernal magic that informed the work of the pagan statuaries. But this superstitious fear presently yielded to a conviction, or rather intuition—which I could not possibly have explained—that the gods had been belied because they were beautiful.

... (Blindly and gropingly I had touched a truth,—the ugly truth that beauty of the highest order, whether mental, or moral, or physical, must ever be hated by the many and loved only by the few!).... And these had been called devils! I adored them!—I loved them!—I promised to detest forever all who refused them reverence!... Oh! the contrast between that immortal loveliness and the squalor of the saints and the patriarchs and the prophets of my religious pictures!—a contrast indeed as of heaven and hell.... In that hour the mediÆval creed seemed to me the very religion of ugliness and of hate. And as it had been taught to me, in the weakness of my sickly childhood, it certainly was. And even to-day, in spite of larger knowledge, the words “heathen” and “pagan”—however ignorantly used in scorn—revive within me old sensations of light and beauty, of freedom and joy.

Only with much effort can I recall these scattered memories of boyhood; and in telling them I am well aware that a later and much more artificial Self is constantly trying to speak in the place of the Self that was,—thus producing obvious incongruities. Before trying to relate anything more concerning the experiences of the earlier Self, I may as well here allow the Interrupter an opportunity to talk.

The first perception of beauty ideal is never a cognition, but a recognition. No mathematical or geometrical theory of Æsthetics will ever interpret the delicious shock that follows upon the boy’s first vision of beauty supreme. He himself could not even try to explain why the newly-seen form appears to him lovelier than aught upon earth. He only feels the sudden power that the vision exerts upon the mystery of his own life,—and that feeling is but dim deep memory,—a blood-remembrance.

Many do not remember, and therefore cannot see—at any period of life. There are myriad minds no more capable of perceiving the higher beauty than the blind wan fish of caves—offspring of generations that swam in total darkness—is capable of feeling the gladness of light. Probably the race producing minds like these had no experience of higher things,—never beheld the happier vanished world of immortal art and thought. Or perhaps in such minds the higher knowledge has been effaced or blurred by long dull superimposition of barbarian inheritance.

But he who receives in one sudden vision the revelation of the antique beauty,—he who knows the thrill divine that follows after,—the unutterable mingling of delight and sadness,—he remembers! Somewhere, at some time, in the ages of a finer humanity, he must have lived with beauty. Three thousand—four thousand years ago: it matters not; what thrills him now is the shadowing of what has been, the phantom of rapture forgotten. Without inherited sense of the meaning of beauty as power, of the worth of it to life and love, never could the ghost in him perceive, however dimly, the presence of the gods.

Now I think that something of the ghostliness in this present shell of me must have belonged to the vanished world of beauty,—must have mingled freely with the best of its youth and grace and force,—must have known the worth of long light limbs on the course of glory, and the pride of the winner in contests, and the praise of maidens stately as that young sapling of a palm, which Odysseus beheld, springing by the altar in Delos.... All this I am able to believe, because I could feel, while yet a boy, the divine humanity of the ancient gods....

But this new-found delight soon became for me the source of new sorrows. I was placed with all my small belongings under religious tutelage; and then, of course, my reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the beautiful books disappeared; and I was afraid to ask what had become of them. After many weeks they were returned to their former place; and my joy at seeing them again was of brief duration. All of them had been unmercifully revised. My censors had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, and had undertaken to correct that impropriety. Parts of many figures, dryads, naiads, graces, muses had been found too charming and erased with a pen-knife;—I can still recall one beautiful seated figure, whose breasts had been thus excised. Evidently “the breasts of the nymphs in the brake” had been found too charming: dryads, naiads, graces and muses—all had been rendered breastless. And, in most cases, drawers had been put upon the gods—even upon the tiny Loves—large baggy bathing-drawers, woven with cross-strokes of a quill-pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty,—especially the lines of the long fine thighs.... However, in my case, this barbarism proved of some educational value. It furnished me with many problems of restoration; and I often tried very hard to reproduce in pencil-drawing the obliterated or the hidden line. In this I was not successful; but, in spite of the amazing thoroughness with which every mutilation or effacement had been accomplished, my patient study of the methods of attack enabled me—long before I knew Winckelmann—to understand how Greek artists had idealized the human figure.... Perhaps that is why, in after years, few modern representations of the nude could interest me for any length of time. However graceful at first sight the image might appear, something commonplace would presently begin to reveal itself in the lines of those very forms against which my early tutors had waged such implacable war.

Is it not almost invariably true that the modern naked figure, as chiselled or painted, shadows something of the modern living model,—something, therefore, of individual imperfection? Only the antique work of the grand era is superindividual,—reflecting the ideal-supreme in the soul of a race.... Many, I know, deny this;—but do we not remain, to some degree, barbarians still? Even the good and great Ruskin, on the topic of Greek art, spake often like a Goth. Did he not call the Medicean Venus “an uninteresting little person”?

Now after I had learned to know and to love the elder gods, the world again began to glow about me. Glooms that had brooded over it slowly thinned away. The terror was not yet gone; but I now wanted only reasons to disbelieve all that I feared and hated. In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, I found a gladness before unknown. Within myself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for I knew not what were quickening and thrilling. I looked for beauty, and everywhere found it: in passing faces—in attitudes and motions,—in the poise of plants and trees,—in long white clouds,—in faint-blue lines of far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasure of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep, that it frightened me. But at other times there would come to me a new and strange sadness,—a shadowy and inexplicable pain.

I had entered into my Renaissance.

Already must have begun the inevitable fissure between himself and his pious protectress, and one may imagine the emotions of his spiritual pastors and masters aroused by such an incident as this—related in one of his letters of later years:—

“This again reminds me of something. When I was a boy I had to go to confession, and my confessions were honest ones. One day I told the ghostly father that I had been guilty of desiring that the devil would come to me in the shape of the beautiful women in which he came to the anchorites in the desert, and that I thought I should yield to such temptations. He was a grim man who rarely showed emotion, my confessor, but on that occasion he actually rose to his feet in anger.

“‘Let me warn you!’ he cried, ‘let me warn you! Of all things never wish that! You might be more sorry for it than you can possibly believe!’

“His earnestness filled me with a fearful joy;—for I thought the temptation might actually be realized—so serious he looked ... but the pretty succubi all continued to remain in hell.”

From these indications the belief is unavoidable that there was never the slightest foundation for the assertion that an endeavour was made to train him for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother he distinctly denies it. He says:—

“You were misinformed as to Grand-aunt educating your brother for the priesthood. He had the misfortune to pass some years in Catholic colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists in keeping the pupils as ignorant as possible. He was not even a Catholic.”

Indeed his bitterness against the Roman Church eventually crystallized into something like an obsession, aroused perhaps by inherited tendencies, by the essential character of his mind, and by those in authority over him in his boyhood driving him, by too great an insistence, to revolt. He was profoundly convinced that the Church, with its persistent memory and far-reaching hand, had never forgotten his apostasy, nor failed to remind him of the fact from time to time. This conviction remained a dim and threatening shadow in the background of his whole life; to all remonstrance on the subject his only reply was, “You don’t know the Church as I do;” and several curious coincidences in crises of his career seemed to him to justify and confirm this belief.

Of the course and character of his education but little is known. He is said to have spent two years in a Jesuit college in the north of France, where he probably acquired his intimate and accurate knowledge of the French tongue. He was also for a time at Ushaw, the Roman Catholic college at Durham,[2] and here occurred one of the greatest misfortunes of his life. In playing the game known as “The Giant’s Stride” he was accidentally blinded in one eye by the knotted end of a rope suddenly released from the hand of one of his companions. In consequence of this the work thrown upon the other eye by the enormous labours of his later years kept him in constant terror of complete loss of sight. In writing and reading he used a glass so large and heavy as to oblige him to have it mounted in a handle and to hold it to his eye like a lorgnette, and for distant observation he carried a small folding telescope.

The slight disfigurement, too,—it was never great,—was a source of perpetual distress. He imagined that others, more particularly women, found him disgusting and repugnant in consequence of the film that clouded the iris.

This accident seems to have ended his career at Ushaw, for his name appears upon the rolls for 1865, when he was in his sixteenth year, and in a letter written in Japan to one of his pupils, whom he reproves for discouragement because of an interruption of his studies caused by illness, he says:—

“A little bodily sickness may come to any one. Many students die, many go mad, many do foolish things and ruin themselves for life. You are good at your studies, and mentally in sound health, and steady in your habits—three conditions which ought to mean success. You have good eyes and a clear brain. How many thousands fail for want of these?

“When I was a boy of sixteen, although my blood relations were—some of them—very rich, no one would pay anything to help me finish my education. I had to become what you never have had to become—a servant. I partly lost my sight. I had two years of sickness in bed. I had no one to help me. And I had to educate myself in spite of all difficulties. Yet I was brought up in a rich home, surrounded with every luxury of Western life.

“So, my dear boy, do not lie there in your bed and fret, and try to persuade yourself that you are unfortunate.

This is the only light to be found upon those three dark years between his leaving Ushaw and his arrival in America. The rupture with his grand-aunt was complete. Among the fanatic converts were not wanting those to widen the breach made by the pagan fancies of the boy. Her property, which he had been encouraged to look upon as his inheritance, was dribbling away in the hands of those whose only claim to business ability was their religious convictions, and a few years after their separation her death put an end to any efforts at reconciliation and showed what great financial sacrifices she had made in the interests of her faith. Some provision was made for him in her will, but he put forward no claims, and the property was found practically to have vanished.

To what straits the boy was driven at this time in his friendlessness there is no means of knowing. One of his companions at Ushaw says:—

“In 1866 I left Ushaw, and I am unable to recall now whether he was there at that time. I had several letters from him subsequently, at a time when he was suffering the peine forte et dure of direct penury in London. In some evil quarter by the Thames poverty obliged him to take refuge in the workhouse. In a letter received from him while living in that dreadful place, he described the sights and sounds of horror which even then preferred the shade of night—of windows thrown violently open, or shattered to pieces, shrieks of agony, or cries of murder, followed by a heavy plunge in the river.”

The reference in the Japanese letter mentioned above is the only one to be found in his correspondence, and in even the most intimate talk with friends he avoided reference to this period as one too painful for confidence. Another fragment of the autobiography—“Stars”—can, however, be guessed to refer to an experience of this cruel time.

“I take off my clothes,—few and thin,—and roll them up into a bundle, to serve me for a pillow: then I creep naked into the hay.... Oh, the delight of my hay-bed—the first bed of any sort for many a long night!—oh, the pleasure of the sense of rest! The sweet scent of the hay!... Overhead, through a skylight, I see stars—sharply shining: there is frost in the air.

“The horses, below, stir heavily at moments, and paw. I hear them breathe; and their breath comes up to me in steam. The warmth of their great bodies fills the building, penetrates the hay, quickens my blood;—their life is my fire.

“So contentedly they breathe!... They must be aware that I am here—nestling in their hay. But they do not mind;—and for that I am grateful. Grateful, too, for the warmth of their breath, the warmth of their pure bodies, the warmth of their good hay,—grateful even for those stirrings which they make in their rest, filling the dark with assurance of large dumb tolerant companionship.... I wish I could tell them how thankful I am,—how much I like them,—what pleasure I feel in the power that proceeds from them, in the sense of force and life that they spread through the silence, like a large warm Soul....

“It is better that they cannot understand. For they earn their good food and lodging;—they earn the care that keeps them glossy and beautiful;—they are of use in the world. And of what use in the world am I?...

“Those sharply shining stars are suns,—enormous suns. They must be giving light to multitudes unthinkable of other worlds.... In some of those other worlds there must be cities, and creatures resembling horses, and stables for them, and hay, and small things—somewhat like rats or mice—hiding in the hay.... I know that there are a hundred millions of suns. The horses do not know. But, nevertheless, they are worth, I have been told, fifteen hundred dollars each: they are superior beings! How much am I worth?...

“To-morrow, after they have been fed, I also shall be fed—by kindly stealth;—and I shall not have earned the feeding, in spite of the fact that I know there are hundreds of millions of suns!”

Sometime during the year 1869—the exact date cannot be ascertained—Lafcadio Hearn, nineteen years old, penniless, delicate, half-blind, and without a friend, found himself in the streets of New York.