Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

20. From the Far East to Mars: Lafcadio Hearn and Percival Lowell

From the Far East to Mars lafcadio hearn and percival lowell when lafcadio hearn (1850–1904) entered a room, people tried not to stare. A slight man with one blind eye and the other bulging from strain, he looked all wrong. The daughter of the renowned Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa remembered his visit in Tokyo. Apart from Hearn, the company included the Asian scholar Sturgis Bigelow and Percival Lowell, author of The Soul of the Far East (Atlantic, September–December 1887). Fenollosa’s daughter thought Hearn a repulsive-looking man with a beautiful voice: “He was totally blind,” she wrote erroneously, “and his food landed in strange places, much to my delight.”1 Hearn may have had some revenge, for the meal came to a crashing halt when plaster fell from a nearby hall ceiling and a six-foot snake wriggled free of the debris. The butler killed the snake, and Bigelow led the company in three cheers. Lafcadio Hearn published over twenty essays in the Atlantic with titles such as “At the Market of the Dead” (September 1891), “In a Japanese Garden” (July 1892), “The Japanese Smile” (May 1893), “The Genius of Japanese Civilization” (October 1895), “Out of the Street: Japanese Folk-Songs” (September 1896), and the reverie called “Dust” (November 1896). These essays, consolidated into books, formed part of the Houghton Mifflin list. Glimpses of Unfamiliar 20 I suppose you must know, or feel, that any one who wishes to be purely himself, must be isolated in all countries. Quoted in nobushige amenomori, “Lafcadio Hearn the Man,” Atlantic, October 1905 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 172 ] Japan (1894) and Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1895) opened the East to Western readers who seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about its exotic people and customs. The reviewer for the Atlantic thought Hearn had been born “to be the mouthpiece of races so alien to ourselves that they live the poetry they do not talk about.” Praising Hearn’s genius as a poet, he declared his “service to science” equally unique. Between 1895 and 1897, Hearn published Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1895); Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896); and Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East (1897). In Japan, according to the Atlantic reviewer, Hearn discovered a civilization as rich as “ancient Rome,” flush with “military success” and on the brink of modernization.2 Readers may or may not have seen parallels between Japan and the United States, fighting its own war in the Philippines. Hearn, who protested any kind of racial bias and whose last novel, Youma (1890), dealt sympathetically with a slave rebellion, believed that ethical behavior demanded tolerance for people and cultures not one’s own. Like Horace Scudder, he valued what he called moral over intellectual beauty and worried that Japanese enamored of Western ways would adopt Western values.3 In terms of armies, navies, and planned occupations of their neighbors, they already had. Apart from education, Hearn had little in his background to make him either a scientist or a poet. Born to a Greek mother, who named him for her Ionian island, and an Irish father serving as an army surgeon, he spent a Dickensian childhood in the custody of an Irish aunt, who believed that locking children in closets cured a fear of the dark. Hearn lost his left eye in a sports scuffle at St. Cuthbert’s College in England. Morbidly self-conscious after the injury, he met the world with an averted face. At seventeen, he was forced to withdraw from school when a family friend nearly beggared his aunt by exploiting her investments. Sent to Cincinnati to look up a long-lost relative, he received a few dollars and was told not to come again. After a hand-to-mouth year of living on the streets, in which he nearly starved to death, he convinced the printer of a local trade journal to take him on. This job led to his next as a hack reporter for the daily Cincinnati Enquirer, where he made a specialty of lurid stories about the city’s misfits. Hearn earned a reputation for his coverage of the Tanyard murder trial, in which the jury found a father Lafcadio Hearn & Percival Lowell [ 173 ] and...