CONCERNING LAFCADIO HEARN

Lafcadio Hearn.
From a Photograph by Gutekunst, 1889.

Frontispiece.

Concerning Lafcadio
Hearn. by george m. gould, m.d.

WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY
By LAURA STEDMAN

WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS

T. FISHER UNWIN

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20

1908

[All rights reserved]

CONTENTS

chap. page

I. HEREDITY AND THE EARLY LIFE [1]

II. IN PERSON [7]

III. THE PERIOD OF THE GRUESOME [13]

IV. THE NEW ORLEANS TIME [33]

V. AT MARTINIQUE [57]

VI. "GETTING A SOUL" [65]

VII. "IN GHOSTLY JAPAN" [81]

VIII. AS A POET [93]

IX. THE POET OF MYOPIA [103]

X. HEARN'S STYLE [119]

XI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION [137]

XII. APPRECIATIONS AND EPITOMES [143]

BIBLIOGRAPHY [247]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

To face page

LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY GUTEKUNST
IN 1889 [Frontispiece]

HEARN AT ABOUT THE AGE OF EIGHT, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH [5]

REDUCED FIRST PAGE OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF "YE GIGLAMPZ" [21]

LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT MARTINIQUE, AUGUST 24, 1888 [61]

HANDWRITING OF HEARN IN 1889 [68]

PREFACE

THERE are as many possible biographies of a man as there are possible biographers—and one more! Of Lafcadio Hearn there has been, and there will be, no excuse for any biography whatever. A properly edited volume of his letters, and, perhaps, a critical estimate of the methods and development of his imaginative power and literary character are, and still remain, most desirable. That some competent hand may yet be found to undertake this task is still hoped by those who recognize the value of a man's best work. To furnish material and help toward this end is my object in collecting the following pages. The life of a literary man interests and is of value to the world because of the literature he has created. Without a bibliography, without even mention of the works he wrote, his biography would be useless. To correct many untrue and misleading statements and inferences of a serious nature that have been published concerning him and his life, should it ever be undertaken, will prove a labour so difficult and thankless that it will scarcely be entered upon by one who would do it rightly. That it will not be hazarded comes, as I have said, from the fact that it is not needed, because neither Hearn himself, nor his real friends, nor again, a discriminating literary sense, have been, nor can be, under any illusion as to his "greatness." He has been spoken of as "a great man," which, of course, he was not. Two talents he had, but these were far from constituting personal greatness. Deprived by nature, by the necessities of his life, or by conscious intention, of religion, morality, scholarship, magnanimity, loyalty, character, benevolence, and other constituents of personal greatness, it is more than folly to endeavour to place him thus wrongly before the world.

The irony of the situation is pathetically heightened by the fact that, supposing him to be very great, "the weaknesses of very great men," which he said should not be spoken of, are amazingly paraded in the letters. Had he ever dreamed that his letters would be published, he would not, and could not, have so unblushingly exposed himself and his faults to the public gaze. The fact has now been writ exceeding large, or it would not be, and should not be, corrected and contradicted. A word to the wise suffices.

There remains the question, truly pertinent, concerning the nature and progress toward perfection of his imagination, and of his literary execution.

We know nothing, and doubtless we may never know anything definite, accurate and of value about the character either of his father or of his mother. Any attempt, therefore, to estimate what effect heredity had in handing down the strange endowment we find in his early manhood is wholly futile. We may not be too sure concerning either the parentage or nationality ascribed to him.

Moreover, in the last analysis, Hearn was no "product of his environment." In a certain sense, he was of the school of Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Loti, and Zola, but with such differences and variations that these teachers may not take much credit or flattery to themselves. The great, the distinctive, the dominating force which controlled and created Hearn's literary makings, his morbid vision, was not "environment" as the critics and scientists mean by the term. These have not yet learned that Art and Life hang upon the perfection and peculiarities of the senses of the artist and of the one who lives, and that intellect and especially æsthetics are almost wholly the product of vision. Conversely, the morbidities and individualisms of Art and Life often depend pre-eminently upon the morbidities of vision.

Character, lastly, is the action or reaction of personality against circumstance, not under and dominated by circumstance. To have character is to control circumstance; Hearn was always its slave. Except in one particular, the pursuit of literary excellence, Hearn had no character whatever. His was the most unresisting, most echolike mind I have ever known. He was a perfect chameleon; he took for the time the colour of his surroundings. He was always the mirror of the friend of the instant, or if no friend was there, of the dream of that instant. The next minute he was another being, acted upon by the new circumstance, reflecting the new friend, or redreaming the old and new-found dream. They who blame him too sharply for his disloyalty and ingratitude to old friends do not understand him psychologically. There was nothing behind the physical and neurologic machine to be loyal or disloyal. He had no mind, or character, to be possessed of loyalty or disloyalty. For the most part, he simply dropped his friends, and rarely spoke ill of them or of his enemies. There was nothing whatever in him, except perhaps for the short time when he said his friend had given him a soul, to take the cast and function of loyalty or disloyalty, gratitude or ingratitude. One does not ask originality or even great consistency of an echo, and, of all men that have ever lived, Hearn, mentally and spiritually, was most perfectly an echo. The sole quality, the only originality, he brought to the fact, or to the echo, was colour—a peculiar derivation of a maimed sense. He created or invented nothing; his stories were always told him by others; at first they were gruesome tales even to horror and disgust. He learned by practice to choose lovelier stories, ones always distant, sometimes infinitely distant, and he learned to retell or echo them with more artistic skill and even a matchless grace. His merit, almost his sole merit, and his unique skill lay in the strange faculty of colouring the echo with the hues and tints of heavenly rainbows and unearthly sunsets, all gleaming with a ghostly light that never was on sea or shore. So that, fused as he was with his work, he himself became that impossible thing, a chromatic voice, a multicoloured echo.

We must, therefore, accept the facts as we find them, the young man as we find him, uneducated, friendless, without formed character, with a lot of heathenish and unrestrained appetites, crippled as to the most important of the senses, poverty-stricken, improvident, of peculiar and unprepossessing appearance and manners, flung into an alien world in many ways more morbid than himself. That he lived at all is almost astonishing, and that he writhed out, how he did it, and the means whereby he finally presented to the best artistic and literary intellects of the world prized values and enjoyments, is indeed worthy of some attention and study.

From letters written to me just prior to his death by that veteran and discriminating critic, Mr. Edmund C. Stedman, I quote a few sentences to show that the appreciation of Hearn has by no means reached its full measure:

"I passed an evening with your Hearn manuscript and the supplementary matter by my granddaughter, and found them both well done and of deep interest. Some of your passages are beautifully written and make me think that if you will give us more of the style which is so plainly at your command, you will gain, etc.... The publishers do not understand, as I do, that Hearn will in time be as much of a romantic personality and tradition as Poe now is. I strongly urged one publisher to buy those copyrights owned by three other firms on any terms and in the end bring out a definitive edition of his complete works."

As to Miss Stedman's workmanlike bibliography, it should be said that the rule which has been followed in excluding less valuable reviews and notices, was based upon the effort to include doubtful ones only when of exceptional value, by a personal friend of Hearn, etc. Files of ordinary newspapers are not preserved even in local libraries, and, therefore, references to them have been excluded except under peculiar circumstances of authorship, opinions stated, etc.

For their kind permission to make extracts from Hearn's published works, grateful acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Little, Brown and Company, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper Brothers, and The Macmillan Company.

Should this volume bring in more money than the necessary expenses of compiling it, the excess will be sent to Mrs. Hearn through the Japanese Consul, or in some other way.

George M. Gould.

CHAPTER I.—HEREDITY AND THE EARLY LIFE

Hearn at about the Age of Eight.

From a Photograph.

To face page 1.

MANY conflicting accounts have been given concerning Hearn's parents and childhood. From his own statements made in 1889, the notes of which, taken down at the moment, are before me, he was born on June 27, 1850, at Leucadia, in Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Islands. His father, he said, was an Irishman, Charles Bush Hearn, Surgeon-Major in the 76th English Infantry Regiment, which had been stationed at Madras, Calcutta. The regiment was later merged into the 22nd West Riding Battalion. His mother was a Greek from Cerigo, another of the Ionian Isles; her name he had forgotten. He spoke of his father and mother as having been married, and of a subsequent divorce, about 1857 or 1858. Allusion was made to a younger brother, named Daniel, who was brought up by an artist, a painter, Richard Hearn, a brother of Charles Bush Hearn, who lived in Paris. [1] Hearn thought this brother was educated as a civil engineer. After the divorce his mother remarried, her second husband being a lawyer, a Greek, name unknown, and living at Smyrna, Asia Minor. Lafcadio's father also remarried, taking his wife to India. Three daughters were said to have been born there. Lafcadio was put under the care of his aunt, Mrs. Sarah Brenane, of Dublin, No. 73 Upper Leeson Street. She was a widow without children. In a letter to me, written prior to 1889, Hearn says: "As for me, I have a good deal in me not to thank my ancestors for; and it is a pleasure that I cannot, even if I would, trace myself two generations back, not even one generation on my mother's side. Half these Greeks are mixed with Turks and Arabs—don't know how much of an Oriental mixture I have, or may have." And again, "I do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead. My father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history of my mother's marriage." He told me later that this romance was said to have been that Surgeon-Major Hearn was once set upon by the brothers of the young Greek woman to whom he was paying attention, and that he was left supposedly dead, with about a score of dagger-made wounds in his body.

[ [1] In The Bookbuyer, May, 1896, Hearn's friend, Mr. J. S. Tunison, speaks of the existence of a brother, "a busy farmer in Northwestern Ohio."

In the Dayton, Ohio, Journal, of December 25, 1906, Mr. Tunison speaks authoritatively of the discrepant accounts given by many writers, and by Hearn himself, concerning his parents, birth and early years. "Hearn himself had misgivings, and sometimes associated his baptismal name with the not uncommon Spanish name, Leocadie." The boy, of course, could only repeat what he had been told by his relatives or friends. Physiognomy can help little perhaps, but here its testimony is assuredly not confirmatory of the more common story. Any attempt to secure definite information in Ireland would scarcely be successful. One possibility remained: There is still living an Irish gentleman to whom Lafcadio was sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was placed. I have not the right to mention his name. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870, and through his brother-in-law in Ireland, Lafcadio was, as it were, consigned to my informant. The subject is an unpleasant one to him, and he answered my questions with reluctance. He did not like the boy and did not feel that he had any obligation toward him; in fact, he did not feel that he was in any way responsible for his care. Besides, he had heavy duties toward his own children that absorbed all his energies. "I never had a letter from him. He came to the house three times. Mrs. Brenane sent me money, which I gave to him to pay his bills with. When he got work, he never came near me again." He was not sure that Mrs. Brenane was, in truth, Hearn's aunt, and upon being pressed, answered repeatedly, "I know nothing, nobody knows anything true of Hearn's life. He may have been related to my wife's family, but I never knew." Asked why the lad was "shipped" to him, he replied, "I do not know." Inquiries concerning the boy's schooling brought no more than, "I only know that he could never stay long in one school." "His father was Irish, was he not?" "Yes." "And his mother was Greek?" "O yes, I suppose so," but with an indefinite inflection.

The mystery, therefore, of Hearn's parentage and boyhood years is probably not to be cleared up. He was, perhaps, a "bad boy," and expelled from several schools; his lifelong hatred and fear of Catholics and Jesuits doubtless dates from these youthful and irrational experiences; but it is useless to inquire whether or not they were in any sense justifiable. A little reflected light is thrown upon this period by an apocryphal anecdote in a letter to me, written while Hearn was at my house, and which Miss Bisland in her "Life and Letters" kindly failed to put in its proper place,[2] as well as omitted to say whence she obtained it:

[ [2] Vol. I, pp. 459-460, just prior to the last paragraph.

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 woman in which he came to the Anchorites in the desert, and that I thought that I would 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 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.

The necessary inference, therefore, is that the lad was an unwelcome charge upon those Irish relations or friends of his father, in whose care he was placed. It is said that he always spoke with bitterness of his father, and with love of his mother. Beyond a certain amount of money allotted (by his father?) for his support, neither parent was evidently concerned about his upbringing and welfare, and all who should have been interested in those things made haste to rid themselves of the obligations. If the stories of his boyish "badness" were true, the lad could not be blamed for putting into practice his inherited instincts, so that the pathos of his early misfortunes only increase our sympathy for the youth and his tragedies. (I reproduce a photograph of Lafcadio and his aunt, Mrs. Justin, or Sarah, Brenane. The lad must have been at the time about eight years of age.) The "consignment" of the nineteen-year old youth to the distant relative of the family, who was then living in Cincinnati, explains the reason why, landing in New York, he finally went to Cincinnati. How long he lived in New York City and any details of his life there before he went West, may be held as beyond investigation. Mr. Tunison incidentally speaks of him during this time as "sleeping in dry-goods boxes on the street, etc.," and I have heard that he acted as a restaurant waiter. There have been published stories of a period of want and suffering endured in London before the emigration to New York City. Others concerning great scholarship and the intimate knowledge of several languages, especially French, are surely not true. Even in 1889, after the New Orleans and Martinique periods, Hearn could not speak French with ease or correctness. In Cincinnati he secured the help of a French scholar in translating Gautier's "Émaux et Camées." His want of knowledge of the Latin language is deplored in his letters and, to the last, after a dozen or more years in Japan, his inability to read a Japanese newspaper or speak the language was a source of regret to himself, of errors too numerous to mention, and of grievous limitations in his work as an interpreter. In the one field of which his taste, aptitude and function dictated a wide and stimulating acquaintance, folk-lore, he was lamentably wanting. It might seem unfitting to allude to this were it not well to be discriminating in all cases, and had not Hearn sought to reach authoritativeness in a department wherein he had not gathered the fundamental data.

CHAPTER II.—IN PERSON

WHEN, in 1889, Hearn appeared in my reception room, although I had not seen any photograph of him, and had not even known of his coming, I at once said, "You are Lafcadio?" The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that I am sure he would have run out of the house if I had not at once shown him an overflowing kindness, or if a tone of voice had betrayed any curiosity or doubt. It was at once agreed that he should stay with me for awhile, and there was no delay in providing him with a seat at my table and a room where he could be at his work of proof-correcting. His "Two Years in the French West Indies" was then going through the press, and an incident connected with the proof-reading illustrates how impossible it was for him, except when necessity drove, to meet any person not already known. He wished to give his reader the tune of the songs printed on pages 426-431, but he knew nothing of music. I arranged with a lady to repeat the airs on her piano as he should whistle them, and then to write them on the music-staff. When the fatal evening arrived, Hearn and I went to the lady's house, but as we proceeded his part in our chatting lapsed into silence, and he lagged behind. Although he finally dragged himself to the foot of the doorstep, after I had rung the bell, his courage failed, and before the door was opened I saw him running as if for life, half a square away!

Even before this adventure I had learned that it was useless to try to get him to lunch or dinner if any stranger were present. I think he always listened to detect the possible presence of a stranger before entering the dining-room, and he would certainly have starved rather than submit to such an ordeal. It may be readily imagined that my attempt to secure his services as a lecturer before a local literary society was a ludicrous failure. He would have preferred hanging.

I allude to this attitude of his mind from no idle or curious reason, but because it arose from logical and necessary reasons. When, later, he was in Japan, I was once importuned, and should not have yielded, to give a friend, who was about to visit Tōkyō, a note of introduction. As I warned my friend Hearn refused to see visitors.

That his extreme shyness depended upon his being unknown, and that it was united to a lack of humour, may be gathered from the fact that, when he came from Martinique, he wore a clothing which inevitably made the passers-by turn and look and smile. Long and repeated endeavours were necessary before I could get his consent to lay aside the outrageous tropical hat for one that would not attract attention. How little he recked of this appears from the tale I heard that a lot of street gamins in Philadelphia formed a queue, the leader holding by Hearn's coat-tails, and, as they marched, all kept step and sang in time, "Where, where, where did you get that hat?"

At once, upon first meeting Hearn, I instinctively recognized that upon my part the slightest sign of a desire or attempt to study him, to look upon him as an object of literary or "natural" history, would immediately put an end to our relations. Indeed, it never at that time entered my mind to think thus of him, and only since collections of his letters and biographies are threatened has it occurred to me to think over our days and months together, and to help, so far as advisable, toward a true understanding of the man and his art.

In 1889 Lafcadio was 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighed 137 pounds, and had a chest girth of 36-3/4 inches.

The summer of 1889 made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character. I suspect it was his first experience in anything that might be called home-life. To his beloved pays des revenants, Martinique, his mind constantly reverted, with an Ahnung that he should never see it again. There are truth and pathos and keen self-knowledge, frankly expressed in the letters he would write me in the next room, immediately after we had chatted long together, and when he felt that the pen could better express what he shyly shrank from speaking:

Ah! to have a profession is to be rich, to have international current-money, a gold that is cosmopolitan, passes everywhere. Then I think I would never settle down in any place; would visit all, wander about as long as I could. There is such a delightful pleasantness about the first relations with people in strange places—before you have made any rival, excited any ill wills, incurred anybody's displeasure. Stay long enough in any one place and the illusion is over; you have to sift this society through the meshes of your nerves, and find perhaps one good friendship too large to pass through.

It is a very beautiful world; the ugliness of some humanity only exists as the shadowing that outlines the view; the nobility of man and the goodness of woman can only be felt by those who know the possibilities of degradation and corruption. Philosophically I am simply a follower of Spencer, whose mind gives me the greatest conception of Divinity I can yet expand to receive. The faultiness is not with the world, but with myself. I inherit certain susceptibilities, weaknesses, sensitivenesses, which render it impossible to adapt myself to the ordinary milieu; I have to make one of my own wherever I go, and never mingle with that already made. True, I love much knowledge, but I escape pains which, in spite of all your own knowledge, you could wholly comprehend, for the simple reason that you can mingle with men.

I am really quite lonesome for you, and am reflecting how much more lonesome I shall be in some outrageous equatorial country where I shall not see you any more;—also it seems to me perfectly and inexplainably atrocious to know that some day or other there will be no Gooley at —— St. That I should cease to make a shadow some day seems quite natural, because Hearney boy is only a bubble anyhow ("The earth hath bubbles"),—but you, hating mysteries and seeing and feeling and knowing everything,—you have no right ever to die at all. And I can't help doubting whether you will. You have almost made me believe what you do not believe yourself: that there are souls. I haven't any, I know; but I think you have,—something electrical and luminous inside you that will walk about and see things always. Are you really—what I see of you—only an Envelope of something subtler and perpetual? Because if you are, I might want you to pass down some day southward,—over the blue zone and the volcanic peaks like a little wind,—and flutter through the palm-plumes under the all-putrefying sun,—and reach down through old roots to the bones of me, and try to raise me up....

The weakness and even exhaustion which the West Indian climate had wrought in Hearn were painfully apparent. His stay in Philadelphia, warm as that summer was to us, brought him speedily back to physical health. The lesson was not unheeded, nor its implications, by his sensitive mind.

I reproduce two photographs of Hearn: the first taken in 1888 (facing page 61); and the second, by Mr. Gutekunst, at my urgent solicitation, in 1889, while Hearn was stopping at my house (Frontispiece).

The first photograph, taken in Martinique, brings out the habitual sadness and lack of vivacity in his physiognomy. In my picture of 1889 (the second) I was unable, despite all effort, to get Hearn to present to the camera his entire face with naturally open eyes, and the customary expression. He resolutely refused, and consented to the compromise of a two-thirds view with closed eyes. And this to me is still the most truthful and hence the most expressive of all his photographs. It is so suggestive because of its negations, so expressive because non-expressive. But it indicates, silently and by inference, the most significant fact about the man.

To those who are expert in such things, the stare of the highly myopic eye is known to be not that of mental action and seeing, but of not seeing. When we walk, we are forward-looking beings, and what goes on within the eye or brain and what may be behind us is totally ignored. But for a highly myopic person there is no outward or forward looking. Hearn's closed eye gives, therefore, a decidedly more truthful lesson in physiognomy than does the open and protruding one, which cannot see the coming or future scene, or which sees it so vaguely that its hint of the scene is perhaps more useless than the imagined picture of the totally blind. His inability to see the presenting world had resulted in a renunciation of outlook and an absolute incuriosity as to the future. With weaklings this might have brought about introspection, the mental eye—the product of the physical eye—turned in upon itself. Hearn was too much of an artist to fall into that Death Valley of all æsthetics, and there was a quick acceptance of the logical and inevitable, whence arose the wonder of poetic retrospection.

CHAPTER III.—THE PERIOD OF THE GRUESOME

WHEN Hearn arrived in Cincinnati, in 1871 or 1872, he was twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. All other methods of making a livelihood except that by his pen had failed, or were soon to fail, and it is not long before the literary way is exclusively and permanently adopted. There was a brief first time of service with Robert Clarke and Company as proof-reader. The exact uses of punctuation, the clearness which the proper marks give to writing, soon earned for him the sobriquet "Old Semicolon" among his fellow reporters. All his life Hearn clung meticulously to his theories concerning the necessity and precise rules of punctuation. Some of his later quarrels with periodical editors and proof-readers arose from differences of opinion in these things. There was a short engagement of Hearn by the librarian, Mr. Thomas Vickers, as private secretary or helper. Among his early friends was a printer, Mr. Henry Watkin, now residing at 1312 McMillan Street, who was kind to him, and who taught him to set type.

"In 1874," Mr. O. P. Caylor[3] writes, "Col. Cockerill of the World was managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer. A few weeks previous to the 'Tan-Yard Murder' Mr. Hearn came to the Enquirer office to sell a manuscript. Upstairs he ventured, but there his courage failed him. It was not enough to induce him to brave the awful editorial presence. So he paced up and down the hall with his velvet restless tread until the awful door opened and the terrible giant came forth. Hearn would, no doubt, have run away had he not been at the rear of the hall when Mr. Cockerill came out into the other end, and the stairway was between.

[ [3] A quotation in the Author, January 15, 1890, from an article by Mr. Caylor in the Philadelphia North American.

"Thus it occurred that the author of 'Chita' submitted his first manuscript. He came with others later, but never could he persuade himself to knock at that editorial door for admission. Up and down, up and down the hall he would pace or glide until Colonel Cockerill came forth, whether the time consumed in waiting was ten minutes or two hours."

In Current Literature, June, 1896, Colonel John A. Cockerill, writing of Hearn, tells the story thus:

"Some twenty years ago I was the editor in charge of a daily newspaper in a Western city. One day there came to my office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms.

"In a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditure, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable.

"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written....

"He sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have him work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his great bulbous eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament.

"His eyes troubled him greatly in those days. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances."

In January or February, 1874, there was a horrible murder, "the famous Tan-Yard case," in Cincinnati, and Hearn's account of it in the Enquirer, from the newspaper and reportorial standpoint was so graphic and so far beyond the power of all rivals that he was henceforth assured of employment and of a measure and kind of respect. His friend, Mr. Edward Henderson, formerly city editor of the Commercial, now City Clerk in Cincinnati, says that because of his startling report of this murder "his city editors kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper—the night-stations, for in that field mostly developed the sensational events that were worthy of his pen. In these days his powers would be held in reserve to write up what others should discover.... His repertory was strongest in the unusual and the startling. He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment or following up his self-obtained pointer."

The beginning of Hearn's literary career was his report of the Tan-Yard Murder case. It was published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, November, 1874. I shall quote some parts of it in a footnote to illustrate his innate and studied ability to outfit with words and expressions of the most startling and realistic picturing quality, the most horrible and loathsome facts. Keeping in mind the comparison with the illustrations from his later work in which he was equally capable of painting noble and beautiful things (all except those of a spiritual or religious nature), one is filled with admiration of a faculty so rare and perfect. Those who are sensitive should not read the excerpts which I append, and which are given in obedience to a sense of duty.[4]

[ [4] "An Enquirer reporter visited the establishment some hours later, accompanied by Dr. Maley, and examined all so far discovered of Herman Schilling's charred corpse. The hideous mass of reeking cinders, despite all the efforts of the brutal murderers to hide their ghastly crime, remain sufficiently intact to bear frightful evidence against them.

"On lifting the coffin-lid, a powerful and penetrating odour, strongly resembling the smell of burnt beef, yet heavier and fouler, filled the room and almost sickened the spectators. But the sight of the black remains was far more sickening. Laid upon the clean white lining of the coffin, they rather resembled great shapeless lumps of half-burnt bituminous coal than aught else at the first hurried glance; and only a closer investigation could enable a strong-stomached observer to detect their ghastly character—masses of crumbling human bones, strung together by half-burnt sinews, or glued one upon another by a hideous adhesion of half-molten flesh, boiled brains and jellied blood, mingled with coal.

"The skull had burst like a shell in the fierce furnace heat, and the whole upper portion seemed as though it had been blown out by the steam from the boiling and bubbling brains. Only the posterior portion of the occipital and parietal bones, and the inferior and superior maxillary, and some of the face bones remained,—the upper portion of the skull bones being jagged, burnt brown in some spots, and in others charred to black ashes. The brain had all boiled away, save a small waste lump at the base of the skull about the size of a lemon. It was crisped and still warm to the touch. On pushing the finger through the crisp, the interior felt about the consistency of banana fruit, and the yellow fibre seemed to writhe like worms in the Coroner's hands. The eyes were cooked to bubbled crisps in the blackened sockets, and the bones of the nose were gone, leaving a hideous hole.

"So covered were the jaws and the lower facial bones with coal, crusted blood and gummy flesh, that the Coroner at first supposed that the lower maxillary had been burned away. On tearing away the frightful skull-mask of mingled flesh and coal and charred gristle, however, the grinning teeth shone ghastly white, and the jaws were found intact. They were set together so firmly that it was found impossible to separate them, without reducing the whole mass to ashes. So great had been the heat that the Coroner was able to crumble one of the upper teeth in his fingers.

"Besides the fragments of the skull, have been found six ribs of the right side and four of the left; the middle portion of the spinal-column; the liver, spleen, and kidneys; the pelvic bones, the right and left humerus, the femoral bone and the tibia and fibula of both legs. The body had burnt open at the chest, and the heart and lungs had been entirely consumed. The liver had been simply roasted and the kidneys fairly fried. There is a horrible probability that the wretched victim was forced into the furnace alive, and suffered all the agonies of the bitterest death man can die, while wedged in the flaming flue. The teeth were so terribly clinched that more than one spectator of the hideous skull declared that only the most frightful agony could have set those jaws together. Perhaps, stunned and disabled by the murderous blows of his assailants, the unconscious body of the poor German was forced into the furnace. Perhaps the thrusts of the assassin's pitchfork, wedging him still further into the fiery hell, or perhaps the first agony of burning when his bloody garments took fire, revived him to meet the death of flames. Fancy the shrieks for mercy, the mad expostulation, the frightful fight for life, the superhuman struggle for existence—a century of agony crowded into a moment—the shrieks growing feebler—the desperate struggle dying into feeble writhings. And through it all, the grim murderers, demoniacally pitiless, devilishly desperate, gasping with their exertions to destroy a poor human life, looking on in silent triumph, peering into the furnace until the skull exploded, and the steaming body burst, and the fiery flue hissed like a hundred snakes! It may not be true—we hope for humanity's sake it cannot be true; but the rightful secrets of that fearful night are known only to the criminals and their God. They may be brought to acknowledge much; but surely never so much as we have dared to hint at."

"When his city editor, in compliance with the urgency of a steeple-climber, consented to send a reporter to take observations of the city from the top of the cross surmounting the spire of St. Peter's Cathedral in Cincinnati, Hearn was the man selected. In mentioning the assignment to him, the city editor handed him a valuable field-glass, with the suggestion that he might find it useful. On taking his departure with the climbers, Hearn quietly handed back the glasses with the remark in undertone, 'Perhaps I'd better not take these; something might happen.' He made the trip to the top of the spire, though the men found it necessary to haul him part of the way in mid-air and to bodily place and hold him on top of the cross. And he produced an account of that thrilling experience that went the round of the newspaper world."[5]

[ [5] Our wonder at the performance is heightened by the fact that Hearn, of course, saw nothing of what he so vividly described.

It is little wonder that his "Vocabulary of the Gruesome" became famous, since I have learned from his friend and associate, the artist, Mr. Farney, and also from others, certain facts which demonstrate that this vocabulary was gathered not only or chiefly because of the exigencies of his work as a reporter, or to express the revolting in thrilling words, but because he had a spontaneous lickerishness for the things themselves. He positively delighted in the gruesome. With his fingers he dug into the scorched flesh and the exuding brains of the murdered man's body when it was taken from the furnace, and in another murder case he slid on the floor, as if on ice, in the congealed blood of the victim. "He even drank blood at the abattoirs with the consumptives when that craze had fallen upon the people of Cincinnati." There is more than an excuse for mentioning these things; it is necessary to do so in order to understand the origin and transformation of Hearn's chief endowment as a writer.

Even more convincing, perhaps, than these offensive gloatings as regards his native love of the gruesome, is the unconscious testimony given in the history of an illustrated paper established by Mr. Farney and Mr. Hearn. Mr. Henderson has said of Hearn that "very rarely was he known to throw a soupçon of humour into his work." The newspaper venture demonstrates that even when humour was planned Hearn had none to give.

Number One, Volume One, of Ye Giglampz was issued in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 21, 1874, and describes itself on the title-page as, "A Weekly Illustrated Journal, Devoted to Art, Literature and Satire." The size of the pages was 14-1/2 × 10-3/4 inches. The subsequent issues were larger, about 16 × 11-1/4 inches. There were eight pages in each number, the first, third, fourth and eighth were illustrated by Mr. H. F. Farney; the others were made up of reading matter. The heading of the editorial page did not exactly repeat that of the title-page, but read as follows:

"The Giglampz."

Published Daily, except Week-Days.

Terms, $2.50 per annum.

Address, "Giglampz Publishing Co."

150 West Fourth St.

Reduced First Page of the First Issue.

With the issue of Number Seven (August 2, 1874) appeared a notice that H. F. Farney and Company had purchased the Giglampz from its former proprietors, the new office being henceforth at the North-west corner of Fourth and Race Streets. Number Eight was the last furnished subscribers. Probably the only existing set of this periodical is that kindly lent to me by Mr. Farney at the request of Mr. Alexander Hill of The Robert Clarke Company, Cincinnati. Among the many significant things suggested in looking over the pages, is the fact that this bound file was Hearn's personal copy, his name being written on the cover-leaf by himself—"L. Hearn, 1877"—and just below, this: "Reminiscences of An Editorship under Difficulties."

It is noteworthy that nowhere is it publicly announced that Hearn was the editor, although the fact was probably an open secret in Cincinnati at the time. The truth of the foregoing inscription in his handwriting is confirmed by the acknowledgment of his authorship of most of the articles, contributed as well as editorial, conveyed by his customary signature, penciled at the end or beginning of each paragraph or column which he had written. The very title of the paper itself was a witness in the same way, and shows that at that time, although Hearn kept his name concealed, he was not, as later, sensitive concerning his ocular defect.[6] It is plain that the word Giglampz refers to the large and conspicuous spectacles or eye-glasses which at that time (not later) were worn habitually by Hearn. The proof of this comes out in the illustration occupying the full first page of the initial number, and entitled:

"A Prospect of Herr Kladderadatsch,

Introducynge

Mr. Giglampz tu ye Publycke."

[ [6] In the first number is an editorial paragraph, written by Hearn, reading as follows:—"The public has indulged in speculation and no little levity, in regard to our name. In this as in the future conduct of this extraordinary sheet, we seek only to please ourselves. Whether the Publishing Company will declare 'Irish Dividends' in six months, or not, does not concern us. We (the editorial corps) being on a salary, look on public favour with serene indifference. The name pleases us. We look upon it in the light of a conundrum, calculated to induce reflection in simple minds. We hope some one may solve it, as we have incontinently given it up."

The scene is that of the stage of a theatre, and Kladderadatsch proudly presents Mr. Giglampz to the wildly applauding audience. The head of the obsequious Mr. Giglampz is very large compared with his body, but most conspicuous is the enormous pince-nez astride a nose of fitting proportions. Mr. Farney was even permitted to give a mere hint of the editor's facial expression.

A curious and suggestive, even a pathetic, light is thrown upon Hearn's character by the fact that this personal file of his journal with his own inscriptions, signatures, etc., was found in a second-hand book-store by Mr. Farney after Hearn left Cincinnati.

Although it is as much too long for our quoting as it was for introducing the journalistic venture, I cannot help reproducing Hearn's first editorial, the "Salutatory, By a Celebrated French Author, a Friend of Giglampz":

It was a dark and fearsome night in the month of June, 1874; and the pavements of Fourth Street were abandoned to solitude.

The lamps, dripping huge water-drops fire-tinged from their lurid glare, seemed monstrous yellow goblin-eyes, weeping phosphorescent tears.

It was raining, and the funereal sky flamed with lightning. It was such a rain as in the primeval world created verdant seas of slimy mud, subsequently condensed into that fossiliferous strata where to-day spectacled geologists find imbedded the awful remains of the titanic iguanodon, the plesiosaurus, and the icthyosaurus.

We sat motionlessly meditative in the shadows of a Gothic doorway of medieval pattern, and ruefully observed the movements of a giant rat, slaking his thirst at a water-spout. Suddenly we were aware of a pressure—a gentle pressure on our shoulder.

A hurried glance convinced us that the pressure was occasioned by the presence of a hand.

It was a long, bony, ancient hand, dried and withered to the consistency of India-rubber. It might have been compared to the hand of a mummy embalmed in the reign of Rameses III, but we felt a living warmth in its pressure, penetrating our summer linen.

The Oriental wizards occasionally need the assistance of a magic candle, in their groping amid ancient tombs—a candle which burns with a fuming stench so foul, that hungry ghouls flee dismayedly away. This candle is made of green fat—the fat of men long dead. For such a candle it is of course necessary to have a candlestick. To procure this candlestick it is necessary to cut off the right hand of a murderous criminal executed by impalement, and having carefully dried it, to insert the candle in its ghastly grasp. Now the hand laid on our shoulder strongly resembled such a hand.

The living warmth of its pressure alone restrained us from uttering a shriek of hideous fear. A cold sweat ravaged the starched bosom of our under-garment.

Suddenly a face peered out from the shadow, and the sickly glare of the flickering gas-lamp fell full upon it.

The aspect of that face immediately reassured us.

It was long to grotesqueness and meagre even to weirdness. It would have been strongly Mephistophelic but for an air of joviality that was not wholly saturnine. The eyes were deep, piercing, but "laughter-stirred," as those of Haroun Alraschid. The nose was almost satanically aquiline, but its harsh outline was more than relieved by the long smiling mouth, and the countless wrinkles of merriment that intersected one another in crow's-feet all over the ancient face. The stranger's complexion was that of caout-chouc; and his long lank locks were blacker than the plumage of those yellow-footed birds that prey upon the dead. His whole aspect was that of one who, by some eerie, occult art of self-preservation, had been enabled to live through the centuries.

"Am I not addressing the celebrated author——?" said the voice of the uncouthly-featured.

It was a half-merry, half-mocking voice—a deep voice that sounded as though conveyed from a vast distance through the medium of a pneumatic tube.

It therefore resembled in its tone the dreamily-distant voices never-slumbering Fancy hears in the hours devoted to darkness and slumber by moral people.

An enormous drop of soot-tinged water fell upon our nose, incontestably proving that we were awake; and we murmured monosyllabic assent to the stranger's query.

"It is well," replied the Unknown, with a latitudinarian smile of joy. "I have been seeking you. I need your assistance, your talent, your mental vigour so enormously manifested in your cyclopean[7] phrenological development."

[ [7] The contrast of this allusion to his large single eye with his morbid shyness about it of late years is noteworthy.

"Sapristi, monsieur!—permit me to inquire the nature of——"

"Attend a little, friend, and your curiosity shall be sated with ample satisfaction. I have existed as you see through all ages. I have lived under a thousand alias names, under the various régimes of a thousand civilizations, which flourished on ancient soil now covered by the mile-deep waters of foaming oceans. I have made my dwelling-place in the mighty palace-halls of Egyptian kings, in the giant cities of dead Assyria, in the residences of Aztec monarchs and Peruvian Incas, in the snow-columned temples of the Greek, and the lordly homes of the luxurious Roman. In fact, I am rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; and have been worshipped as a genius in far-sparkling planets ere this mundane sphere was first evolved from that flaming orb. In all time when individualized intelligent thought existed, I have inculcated in living beings the truth of that sublime and eternal maxim—Laugh and grow fat. To-day men must be taught this glorious truth by the Bullock Press rather than the Tongue. I want your pen, not your tongue. Write me a salutatory for my new illustrated weekly—only five cents a copy."

With these words he pressed a glazed Bristol-board card into our trembling hand, and disappeared.

By the light of the weeping street-lamps we read thereon this weird legend:

GIGLAMPZ

The title itself, the Introduction by "Kladderadatsch," and the character of the contributions and cuts make it plain that the third object of the publication, called "Satire," was designed to be much more prominent than "Art" or "Literature." Unquestionably an American Kladderadatsch was planned, and by Hearn and his friends it was supposed that the editor had a sense of humour sufficient to carry on the undertaking. I have quoted the Salutatory to show that with the favouring of youth, ambition, opportunity and the best encouragement, Hearn's mind from the first line drifted inevitably to the fearsome, the weird, the unearthly and far-away. By no power or necessity could his imagination be forced or bound to the task of producing things comic or even satiric, especially such humour and jokes as the Cincinnati newspaper reader wanted in 1874. Of the twelve columns of reading in the first number of Giglampz, Hearn contributed about eight, made up of fifteen or twenty distinct paragraphs. In the second number his contributions number seven; in the third, six; in the fourth, three; in the fifth, four; in the sixth, two; in the seventh, one; in the eighth, one. In about a dozen of the first number, he somewhat unsuccessfully tried to be humorous or satiric, while six were frankly tragical, critical, bitter, etc. In the succeeding numbers Hearn made little effort to be humorous; in the fifth number he describes with startling power a picture of "a hideous scene in the interior of a seraglio;" in number six he returns to the Orient and in "The Fantasy of a Fan" mixes poetry, prose and fancy with a hinting of the subtle soft witchery of the Hearn of twenty-five years later.[8] In the second number is a full-page cut, in which Beecher is depicted as standing before a crowd of jeerers prior to being placed in the stocks, with the scarlet letter "A" upon his breast. Hearn especially requested Mr. Farney to make him one of the conspicuous spectators. The bespectacled face is easily recognizable in the copy given me by the artist. In the seventh number Hearn describes in two columns the story he supposes behind the pictured Gabriel Max, called "The Last Farewell" (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York). It shows so early suggestions of the manhood strength of the wordmaster that I copy it:

[ [8] Mr. Farney tells me that he had to compel Hearn, even then, to moderate the boldness of sentences which would by their sensualism and licence shock their Cincinnati readers.

THE TALE A PICTURE TELLS

"Butchered to make a Roman Holiday"

The remarkably fine engraving from Gabriel Max's picture, "The Last Farewell," in a late issue of the Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung (and which the New York Graphic a few days since stole to spoil in the stealing), is worthy of the celebrated original at Munich—a painting which will never be forgotten by those who have once beheld it. Among modern painters, probably Max has no superior in the art of harmoniously blending the horrible with the pathetic; and in none of his works is this peculiar power exhibited to better advantage than in "The Last Farewell:" a marvel of colour and composition, one of those rare pictures which seem to reflect the living shadows of a dead age with the weird truthfulness of a wizard's mirror.

A beautiful Roman girl is exposed in the Flavian amphitheatre, to be devoured by wild beasts. She can scarcely be eighteen years old, judging from the slender delicacy of her limbs and the childish sweetness of the pretty little brown face which she has vainly been striving to screen from the rude gaze of the shameless populace with the remnants of a rich black veil—probably torn by the rough hands of some brutal lanista. She leans with her back to the great wall of stone, calmly awaiting her fate without any signs of fear, although the hot, foul breath of a panther is already warm upon her naked feet. To her right, but a few feet away, a leopard and a huge bear are tearing each other to pieces; on her left, another den has just been thrown open, and at its entrance appears the hideous head of an immense tiger, with eyes that flame like emeralds.

You can almost feel the warmth of the fierce summer sun shining on that scene of blood and crime, falling on the yellow sands of the arena, drying the dark pools of human blood the wild beasts have left unlapped. You can almost hear the deep hum of a hundred thousand voices above, and the hideous growlings of the contending brutes below. You wonder whether there is one heart in all that vast crowd of cruel spectators wherein some faint impulse of humanity still lingers, one tongue charitable enough to exclaim:

"Poor little thing!"

No: only wicked whispers followed by coarse laughter; monstrous indifference in the lower tiers, brutal yells of bloodthirsty impatience from the upper seats.

Two Roman knights relieve the monotony of the scene by strange speculation.

"One hundred sesterces that the tiger gets her first!"

"Two hundred on the panther!"

"Done, by the gods! Where are the lions?"

"Why, that cursed barbarian killed the last three this morning, one after another. The finest lions of the lot, too."

"Who are you talking about?—that tall, dark Thracian?"

"No: he was killed the day before by the same gladiator that killed the lions. I mean that golden-haired giant—that Goth. Says he was chief in his own country, or something. He's killed everybody and everything pitted against him so far. And this morning they put him naked in the arena, with nothing but a mirmillo's shield, and a sword; and let the lions loose on him one after another. I bet a thousand sesterces on that little Numidian lion; but the rascal killed him as he sprang, with one sword-thrust, and I lost my thousand sesterces. By Hercules, that Goth is a match for a dozen lions!"

"Brave fellow, by all the gods! Did they give him the wooden sword?"

"Julius Cortonus says they did. I didn't stay to see the rest of the games, for I was too angry about my thousand sesterces."

"Furies take that tiger!—I believe the brute's afraid of the girl!"

---

"Why, it is madness to throw such a fine-limbed girl as that to the lions!" cries a Greek merchant, lately arrived in Rome. "Eyes and hair, by Zeus, like Venus Anadyomene. I could sell her for a fortune in a slave-market."

"Aedepol! not in a Roman slave-market, you fool. Why, I've known Lucullus to throw better-looking girls than that into his fishpond, to fatten his lampreys with. May Cerberus swallow that cursed tiger!"

---

The tiger has not yet moved; his vast head and flaming green eyes are just visible at the door of the den. The leopard and the bear are still tearing one another. The panther is gradually, stealthily, noiselessly approaching the poor, helpless girl.

Suddenly a fresh, bright-red rose is thrown from the seats above: it is the last earthly greeting, the last farewell token of some old friend—perhaps a brother, perhaps (O God!) a lover! It falls on the blood-stained sand, shattering itself in perfumed ruin at the maiden's feet.

She starts as the red leaves scatter before her. She advances from the wall, and boldly withdrawing the fragments of her poor, torn veil, looks up into the mighty sea of pitiless visages—looks up with her sweet, childish, cherry-lipped face, and those great, dark, softly sad Roman eyes—to thank him by a last look of love. "Who can it be?"

No one the maiden knows. She only sees a seemingly endless row of cruel and sensual faces, the faces of the wild beast populace of Rome,—the faces which smile at the sight of a living human body, torn limb from limb by lions, and scattered over the sands in crimson shreds of flesh....

Suddenly a terrible yet friendly eye meets and rivets the gaze of her own—an eye keen and coldly-blue as a blade of steel. A sternly handsome Northern face it is, with flowing yellow hair. For an instant the iron lips seem to soften in a smile of pity, and the keen blue eyes become brighter. So do the soft dark ones they meet in that piteous farewell.

She has found her unknown friend.

... A crash—a fierce growl—a faint, helpless cry—a spray of warm, bright blood.

---

"Ah, Caius! you've lost your hundred sesterces. The Fates are against you to-day!"

"Curse the Fates! Did you see the fool who threw her the rose?"

"That great tall Titan of a fellow, with the yellow hair?"

"Yes. That's the Goth."

"What! the gladiator who killed the lions?"

"The same who won his freedom this morning. See! the fool's wiping his eyes now. These Goths can fight like Hercules, but they whine like sick women when a girl is hurt. They think up in the North that women are to be worshipped like the immortal gods. I wish they'd make the great red-headed brute go down and kill that cursed tiger!"

Hearn's single contribution to the last number of the fated Giglampz was a four-column retelling of "the weird story of Loki's evil children from the strange folk-lore of Ancient Scandinavia."

It was thus blood, sensualism and fiendishness that still aroused Hearn's interest when not only not compelled to the choice, but when they were contraindicated and wholly illogical. But it was all a little less revolting, less real, more artistic, than the tan-yard reporting, and it was drawn from more remote sources. Mr. Henderson suggests the same when he writes:

"But it was not in this slavery for a living even to crush out of him the determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of perhaps columns, in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating 'One of Cleopatra's Nights.' ...

"An Oriental warmth and glow pervaded him. While his lines were hard ones in the grime and soot and trying weather of Cincinnati, from which his frail body shrank continually, his trend of thought was largely tropical. Perhaps he saw beyond the dusky faces, rolling eyes and broad noses of the people of the Cincinnati levee, the mixed people of the West Indies and the beautiful little ones of Japan, with whom he was destined to live before long. However that may be, his greatest pleasure, after a translation from Gautier or an original tragedy where he could in his masterful way use his vocabulary of the gruesome, was to study and absorb the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, as he found it in Cincinnati and New Orleans, and to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study. Things that were common to these people in their everyday life, his vivid imagination transformed into a subtle melody of romance. The distant booming upon the midnight air of a river steamer's whistle was for him the roustabout's call to his waiting mistress at the landing, and his fruitful pen drew the picture of their watching and coming and meeting."

The words indolent and sensuous life are also significant. The tropics, their fatalism and the kind of life there lived were drawing him with secret but irresistible force. Now begins to mix with and mollify the gruesome a softer element, also Oriental, or what is much the same thing, tropical—sympathy with and study of the simple and unlettered, those who are the improvident slaves of fate, thoughtless impulse or heedless desire. To them, as we shall see, Hearn's mind turned more and more. His was essentially an Oriental mind and heart, an exotic weed (and weeds may become the loveliest of flowers) dropped by some migrating bird upon the strange crabbed soil of the crudest of Occidentalism. Never did Hearn stop yearning for the warmth, the fatalism and the laziness of tropic semi-barbarism. The gruesome was not being killed, but was being modified and tamed by civilization.

Hearn had been discharged from the Commercial, where his salary was $25 a week, "on an ethical point of policy which need not be discussed here. The Commercial took him on at $22." Judge M. F. Wilson, of Cincinnati, tells me that his discharge was caused by his seeking a licence for and an open marriage with a coloured woman. The licence was refused, because illegal at that time. The law was repealed a little later. The marriage did not take place.[9]

[ [9] Mr. George Mortimer Roe, at that time a friend of Hearn, now living at Long Beach, California, writes me: "Hearn was quite persistent in his efforts to persuade me to assist him in getting the licence, but I told him I could not aid him in his ambition to be guilty of miscegenation. For many years we had been the best of friends, but from that time on he always avoided me, scarcely speaking to me if by accident we did meet."

Mr. Henderson continues thus:

"As Hearn advanced in his power to write, the sense of the discomforts of his situation in Cincinnati grew upon him. His body and mind longed for the congeniality of southern air and scenes. One morning, after the usual hard work of an unusually nasty winter night in Cincinnati, in a leisure hour of conversation, he heard an associate on the paper describe a scene in a Gulf State. It was something about a grand old mansion of an antebellum cotton prince, with its great white columns, its beautiful private drive down to the public road, whitewashed negro-quarters stretching away in the background, in the distance some cypress and live-oaks and Spanish moss, and close by a grove of magnolias with their delightful odours and the melody of mocking-birds in the early sunlight. Hearn took in every word of this, though he had little to say at the time, with great keenness of interest, as shown by the dilation of his nostrils. It was as though he could see and hear and smell the delights of the scene. Not long after this, on leaving Cincinnati for New Orleans, he remarked: 'I have lost my loyalty to this paper, and change was inevitable. Perhaps it isn't so much the lack of opportunity here or a lack of appreciation of associations as this beastly climate. I seem to shrivel up in this alternation of dampness, heat and cold. I had to go sooner or later, but it was your description of the sunlight and melodies and fragrance and all the delights with which the South appeals to the senses that determined me. I shall feel better in the South and I believe I shall do better.'"

Some of his Cincinnati acquaintances speak of his obsequious, even fawning, manner ("timid and feline of approach," says Henderson), of his "washing his hands with invisible water"—characteristics not dictated by the parentage ascribed to him, not consonant with his photographs, and not wholly with his gruesome traits. He wore heavy myopic spectacles at this time, not to see (because they were wholly discarded later), but probably in order not to be seen—i.e. to hide the double deformity of his eyes. One must remember that with or without spectacles the world a foot or two away was much of a mystery to Hearn, and that one fears a surely existent and near-by mystery. One approaches it or comes within its power with doubt, dislike and caution. The play of facial expression was not to be seen by Hearn. All Uriah Heeps may not be myopic, but all highly myopic persons will have slow, stealthy, careful, even catlike attitudes and manners; every step they take must be done with hesitation, bowed head and great care, in order not to fall or stumble against something. The wholly blind walk with more decision and quickness. Of course this slow, soft carefulness of manner, "the velvet feline step," was Hearn's all his life. It followed inexorably that, though possessed of a healthy and athletic body, there was possible for him no athletics which required accuracy of sight or sequent precision and celerity of movement. That with good eyes he would have been an utterly different man in character and in literature, is as certain as that he would have had a very different manner, movement and style of physical existence. With good eyes he would have been strong, athletic, bold, as is admirably illustrated by the fact that in the single sport in which little vision was required—swimming—he was most expert, and that he enjoyed this exercise to the fullest degree.

To scale a steeple in order to describe the city from that unusual point of view was a task worthy of yellow journalism which cared little for accuracy but much for "scare" headlines. Hearn saw little or nothing of the city, of course.

The only letters written during the Cincinnati period, known to exist, are those of 1876, called, "Letters to a Lady," published in the volume, Letters from the Raven, Milton Bronner, editor.[10] One other work, the origins of which date from this period, is "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and with this is demonstrated the beginning of the influence of the modern French school of story-writers. Hearn was tiring of the worst brutality and coarseness of Occidentalism, and seeking a way to the true home of his mind. The ghastly must become the ghostly. The Frenchman's art was to become his half-way house.

[ [10] Brentano's, 1907.

CHAPTER IV.—THE NEW ORLEANS TIME

I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it to a morbid degree. Any place rather than Cincinnati would have been better for the happiness and success of the emigrating boy, but his relatives had ridded themselves of the burden by assenting to his wish. Excepting that to Japan, the only sensible move he made was from Cincinnati toward the tropics, to the half-way house thither—New Orleans. The desire to seek the au delà was present, his friends tell me, throughout the stay in Cincinnati. Perhaps the single city in the world which would satisfy his dream more nearly than could any other, was New Orleans. Being psychologically for the most part of degenerate Latin stock, and especially of the French variety, with the requisite admixture of exotic and tropical barbarism; bathed, but not cooked, in the hot and brilliant sunshine he loved and hated; touched and energized by too little Teutonic blood and influence, New Orleans offered to the unhappy man the best possible surroundings for the growth of his talents. Adding to this fortunate concensus of circumstance and partly a corollary of it was the most fortunate of all accidents that could have occurred to him—that is, the existence of a daily newspaper such as the Times-Democrat; of a paying mass of subscribers relishing Hearn's translations from the most artistic French writers of the short-story; and, most important of all, the presence on the bridge of the noble Captain of the Newspaper enterprise, the veteran editor, Mr. Page M. Baker. One shudders to think what would have been Hearn's later career had it not been for the guidance and help of this wise, sympathetic and magnanimous friend. For the one thing needed by Hearn in those who would be his friends rather than their own was magnanimity. It was his frequent misfortune in life to come under the influence of those as incapable of true unselfishness and real kindness as it was natural for them to be cunning and to use an assumed friendship for hidden flatteries and purposes of their own. Most of these would not have dreamed of associating with the man for any reason other than to stand in the reflected light of his literary fame. Most of them had as little care for his poetic prose, and as little appreciation or knowledge of good literature as they had of "the enclitic de." They had no magnanimity, only wile instead of it. As Hearn was also deprived of large-mindedness in all affairs of the world, he was unhappily prone to accept the offered bribe. He wanted above all things to be flattered and to do as his imperious impulses and weak will suggested. Any one who recognized these things in him and seconded the follies, remained his permitted "friend," but those who withstood them in the least and ran counter to his morbid trends and resolves—these were speedily "dropped," and insulted or grieved to silence. If they had magnanimity, they bore with the man in pity and answered his insults with kind words and kinder deeds. They recognized that they were responsible not to the man but to the carrier of a great talent, and although they might not forget, they gladly forgave, if possibly they might speed him on his predestined way.

Of this number was Baker. Directly or indirectly through him, came a long and happy period of life; came the congenial, educating work, without slavery, of the translations and other easy reportorial services. Of equal importance were the financial rewards. Before and after the New Orleans time not the least of Hearn's misfortunes was his intolerable and brutalizing improvidence and impecuniousness. Under Baker's friendship he came to what for such a person was affluence and independence. He found leisure to read and study and think outside of the journalistic pale, and better still, perhaps,—better to his thinking, at least—he secured the means to indulge his life-long desire for curious and out-of-the-way books. During this time it grew to consciousness with him that in everything, except as regards his beloved Art, he had a little learned to recognize the worth of money.

But within him grew ever stronger the plague of the unsatisfied, the sting of unrest, and he was compelled to obey. In a letter to me from Martinique, after he had recognized his mistake, he admits and explains as follows:

I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of the intellectual life are all lacking here,—no libraries, no books in any language;—a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for months.

But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more daily,—that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish things,—that life is very sweet without them;—and you actually find yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for life in the North are all madness,—that they wasted years which might have been delightfully dozed away in a land where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot.

I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a while,—a short while, probably;—but I do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become tired of places,—or at least of the disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,—the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;—and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;—yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. One feels it least, I imagine, in the tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to do:—To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;—to keep it requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it in very short order.

I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went to Demerara and visited the lesser West Indies in July and August of last year,—returned to New York after three months with some MS.,—sold it,—felt very unhappy at the idea of staying in New York, where I had good offers,—suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics by the same steamer that had brought me. I had no commission, resolved to trust to magazine-work. So far I have just been able to scrape along;—the climate numbs mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for won't come. The real—surpassing imagination—whelms the ideal out of sight and hearing. The world is young here,—not old and wise and grey as in the North; and one must not seek the Holy Ghost in it. I suspect that the material furnished by the tropics can only be utilized in a Northern atmosphere. We will talk about it together.

That he never thought to return to New Orleans is demonstrated by the fact that when he left, he shipped his books to another good friend and great editor, Mr. Alden, to keep for him. When he came to the United States in 1889, he fully intended returning to some tropical land. But it was otherwise ordered, and most fortunately, for a year or two more of life under such conditions would have killed both mind and body.

Upon Hearn's arrival in New Orleans, he began sending a series of charming letters to the Cincinnati Commercial, signed "Ozias Midwinter."[11] They are, indeed, exquisite, and as certainly of a delicacy and beauty which must have made the reader of that time and newspaper wonder what strange sort of a correspondent the editor had secured. The first letter was about Memphis, passed on his way South. I cite some parts to show how the gruesome was merging into or being supplanted by something larger and better, and also to illustrate Hearn's growing interest in colours.

[ [11] Kindly secured by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, Ohio, from a friend and lent to me.

The stranger, however, is apt to leave Memphis with one charming recollection of the place—the remembrance of the sunset scene from the bluffs across the river over Arkansas. I do not think that any part of the world can offer a more unspeakably beautiful spectacle to the traveller than what he may witness any fair evening from those rugged old bluffs at Memphis. The first time I saw it the day had been perfectly bright and clear,—the blue of the sky was unclouded by the least fleecy stain of white cloud; and the sun descended in the west,—not in a yellow haze, or a crimson fog, but with the splendour of his fiery glory almost undimmed. He seemed to leave no trace of his bright fires behind him; and the sky-blue began to darken into night-purple from the east almost immediately. I thought at first it was one of the least romantic sunsets I had ever seen. It was not until the stars were out, and the night had actually fallen, that I beheld the imperial magnificence of that sunset.

---

I once thought, when sailing up the Ohio one bright Northern summer, that the world held nothing more beautiful than the scenery of the Beautiful River—those voluptuous hills with their sweet feminine curves, the elfin gold of that summer haze, and the pale emerald of the river's verdure-reflecting breast. But even the loveliness of the Ohio seemed faded, and the Northern sky-blue palely cold, like the tint of iceberg pinnacles, when I beheld for the first time the splendour of the Mississippi.

"You must come on deck early to-morrow," said the kind Captain of the Thompson Dean; "we are entering the Sugar Country."

So I saw the sun rise over the cane-fields of Louisiana.

It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its setting at Memphis, but of another colour;—an auroral flush of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests of cocoanut palms. Then the day broke gently and slowly—a day too vast for a rapid dawn—a day that seemed deep as Space. I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a vaulted church-roof beside that sky—a sky so softly beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite.

And the giant river broadened to a mile—smooth as a mirror, still and profound as a mountain lake. Between the vastness of the sky and the vastness of the stream, we seemed moving suspended in the midst of day, with only a long, narrow tongue of land on either side breaking the brightness. Yet the horizon never became wholly blue. The green-golden glow lived there all through the day; it was brightest in the south. It was so tropical, that glow;—it seemed of the Pacific, a glow that forms a background to the sight of lagoons and coral reefs and "lands where it is always afternoon."

Below this glow gleamed another golden green, the glory of the waving cane-fields beyond the trees. Huge sugar-mills were breathing white and black clouds into the sky, as they masticated their mighty meal; and the smell of saccharine sweetness floated to us from either shore. Then we glided by miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls; and by the mouths of broad bayous;—past swamps dark with cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient trees;—past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot through with gold. The magnificent old mansions of the Southern planters, built after a generous fashion unknown in the North, with broad verandas and deliciously cool porches, and all painted white or perhaps a pale yellow, looked out grandly across the water from the hearts of shadowy groves; and, like villages of a hundred cottages, the negro quarters dotted the verdant face of the plantation with far-gleaming points of snowy whiteness.

And still that wondrous glow brightened in the south, like a far-off reflection of sunlight on the Spanish Main.

"But it does not look now as it used to in the old slave days," said the pilot, as he turned the great wheel. "The swamps were drained, and the plantations were not overgrown with cottonwood; and somehow or other the banks usen't to cave in then as they do now."

I saw indeed signs of sad ruin on the face of the great plantations; there were splendid houses crumbling to decay, and whole towns of tenantless cabins; estates of immense extent were lying almost unfilled, or with only a few acres under cultivation; and the vigorous cottonwood trees had shot up in whole forests over fields once made fertile by the labour of ten thousand slaves. The scene was not without its melancholy; it seemed tinged by the reflection of a glory passed away—the glory of wealth, and the magnificence of wealth; of riches and the luxury of riches.

O fair paradise of the South, if still so lovely in thy ruin, what must thou have been in the great day of thy greatest glory!

White steamboats, heavily panting under their loads of cotton, came toiling by, and called out to us wild greeting long and shrill, until the pilot opened the lips of our giant boat, and her mighty challenge awoke a thousand phantom voices along the winding shore. Red sank the sun in a sea of fire, and bronze-hued clouds piled up against the light, like fairy islands in a sea of glory, such as were seen, perhaps, by the Adelantado of the Seven Cities.

"Those are not real clouds," said the pilot, turning to the west, his face aglow with the yellow light. "Those are only smoke clouds rising from the sugar mills of Louisiana, and drifting with the evening wind."

The daylight died away and the stars came out, but that warm glow in the southern horizon only paled, so that it seemed a little further off. The river broadened till it looked with the tropical verdure of its banks like the Ganges, until at last there loomed up a vast line of shadows, dotted with points of light, and through a forest of masts and a host of phantom-white river boats and a wilderness of chimneys the Thompson Dean, singing her cheery challenge, steamed up to the mighty levee of New Orleans.

The letters descriptive of New Orleans scenes and life deserve republishing had I space for them here. In a brief paragraph, a sentence perhaps, almost in a word, is given the photograph, chromatic and vitalized in Hearn's unrivalled picturesque style, of the levees, the shipping, the sugar-landing, the cotton-shipping, the ocean steamers, the strange mixture of peoples from all countries and climes; the architecture, streets, markets, etc. The Vendetta of the Sicilian immigrants is described with a strength and vividness which bear eloquent witness to Hearn's innate pleasure in such themes. There is also shown his beginning the study of Creole character, grammar, and language. A peculiarly striking picture is painted of the new huge cotton-press, as a monster whose jaws open with a low roar to devour the immense bale of cotton and to crush it to a few inches of thickness. I cannot exclude this excerpt:

Do you remember that charming little story, "Père Antoine's Date-Palm," written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published in the same volume with "Marjorie Daw" and other tales?

Père Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and died in New Orleans. As a boy, he conceived a strong friendship for a fellow student of about his own age, who, in after years, sailed to some tropical island in the Southern Seas, and wedded some darkly beautiful woman, graceful and shapely and tall as a feathery palm. Père Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friendship strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also passed from the world; but they left a little daughter for some one to take care of.

The good priest, of course, took care of her, and brought her up at New Orleans. And she grew up graceful and comely as her mother, with all the wild beauty of the South. But the child could not forget the glory of the tropics, the bright lagoon, the white-crested sea roaring over the coral reef, the royal green of the waving palms, and the beauty of the golden-feathered birds that chattered among them.

So she pined for the tall palms and the bright sea and the wild reef, until there came upon her that strange homesickness which is death; and still dreaming of the beautiful palms, she gradually passed into that great sleep which is dreamless. And she was buried by Père Antoine near his own home.

By and by, above the little mound there suddenly came a gleam of green; and mysteriously, slowly, beautifully, there grew up towering in tropical grace above the grave, a princely palm. And the old priest knew that it had grown from the heart of the dead child.

So the years passed by, and the roaring city grew up about the priest's home and the palm-tree, trying to push Père Antoine off his land. But he would not be moved. They piled up gold upon his doorsteps and he laughed at them; they went to law with him and he beat them all; and, at last, dying, he passed away true to his trust; for the man who cuts down that palm-tree loses the land that it grows upon.

"And there it stands," says the Poet, "in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady, whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamoured. May the hand wither that touches her ungently!"

Now I was desirous above all things to visit the palm made famous by this charming legend, and I spent several days in seeking it. I visited the neighbourhood of the old Place d'Armes—now Jackson Square—and could find no trace of it; then I visited the southern quarter of the city, with its numberless gardens, and I sought for the palm among groves of orange-trees overloaded with their golden fruit, amid broad-leaved bananas, and dark cypresses, and fragrant magnolias and tropical trees of which I did not know the names. Then I found many date-palms. Some were quite young, with their splendid crest of leafy plumes scarcely two feet above the ground; others stood up to a height of thirty or forty feet. Whenever I saw a tall palm, I rang the doorbell and asked if that were Père Antoine's date-palm. Alas! nobody had ever heard of the Père Antoine.

Then I visited the ancient cathedral, founded by the pious Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor of New Orleans, one hundred and fifty years ago; and I asked the old French priest whether they had ever heard of the Père Antoine. And they answered me that they knew him not, after having searched the ancient archives of the ancient Spanish Cathedral.

Once I found a magnificent palm, loaded with dates, in a garden on St. Charles Street, so graceful that I felt the full beauty of Solomon's simile as I had never felt it before: "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree." I rang the bell and made inquiry concerning the age of the tree. It was but twenty years old; and I went forth discouraged.

At last, to my exceeding joy, I found an informant in the person of a good-natured old gentleman, who keeps a quaint bookstore in Commercial Place. The tree was indeed growing, he said, in New Orleans Street, near the French Cathedral, and not far from Congo Square; but there were many legends concerning it. Some said it had been planted over the grave of some Turk or Moor—perhaps a fierce corsair from Algiers or Tunis—who died while sailing up the Mississippi, and was buried on its moist shores. But it was not at all like the other palm-trees in the city, nor did it seem to him to be a date-palm. It was a real Oriental palm; yea, in sooth, such a palm as Solomon spake of in his Love-song of Love-songs.

"I said, I will go up to the palm-tree; I will take hold of the boughs thereof." ...

I found it standing in beautiful loneliness in the centre of a dingy woodshed on the north side of New Orleans Street, towering about forty feet above the rickety plank fence of the yard. The gateway was open, and a sign swung above it bearing the name, "M. Michel." I walked in and went up to the palm-tree. A labourer was sawing wood in the back-shed, and I saw through the windows of the little cottage by the gate a family at dinner. I knocked at the cottage-door, and a beautiful Creole woman opened it.

"May I ask, Madame, whether this palm-tree was truly planted by the Père Antoine?"

"Ah, Monsieur, there are many droll stories which they relate of that tree. There are folks who say that a young girl was interred there, and it is also said that a Sultan was buried under that tree—or the son of a Sultan. And there are also some who say that a priest planted it."

"Was it the Père Antoine, Madame?"

"I do not know, Monsieur. There are people also who say that it was planted here by Indians from Florida. But I do not know whether such trees grow in Florida. I have never seen any other palm-tree like it. It is not a date-palm. It flowers every year, with a beautiful yellow blossom the colour of straw, and the blossoms hang down in pretty curves. Oh, it is very graceful! Sometimes it bears fruit, a kind of oily fruit, but not dates. I am told that they make oil from the fruit of such palms."

I thought it looked so sad, that beautiful tree in the dusty woodyard, with no living green thing near it. As its bright verdant leaves waved against the blue above, one could not but pity it as one would pity some being, fair and feminine and friendless in a strange land. "Oh, c'est bien gracieux," murmured the handsome Creole lady.

"Is it true, Madame, that the owner of the land loses it if he cuts down the tree?"

"Mais oui! But the proprietors of the ground have always respected the tree, because it is so old, so very old!"

Then I found the proprietor of the land, and he told me that when the French troops first arrived in this part of the country they noticed that tree. "Why," I exclaimed, "that must have been in the reign of Louis XIV!" "It was in 1679, I believe," he answered. As for the Père Antoine, he had never heard of him. Neither had he heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. So that I departed, mourning for my dead faith in a romance which was beautiful.

Next to his best Japanese studies, I suspect it will finally come to recognition that Hearn's greatest service to literature is his magnificent series of translations during the New Orleans years. As a translator there were given him his data by creative minds. His own mental equipment prevented creation, and his clearly set limits as a translator added power to his ability and function as a colourist and word-artist. His was almost a unique expertness of entering into the spirit of his models, refeeling their emotions, reimagining their thought and art, and reclothing it with the often somewhat hard and stiff material of English weaving. All of their spirit philologically possible to be conveyed to us, we may be sure he re-presents. For his was the rare power of the instant, the iridescent, the wingèd word. I think it was innate and spontaneous with him, a gift of the inscrutable, illogic, and fantastically generous-niggard Fates. All his studies and conscious efforts were almost unavailing either to hinder or to further its perfection. If to Fate we may not be grateful, we can at least thank the weird lesser gods of life for the mysterious wonder of the gift. The wealth of loving labour silently offered in the 187 or more translations published in the Times-Democrat is marvellous. Hearn brought to my house the loose cuttings from the files, and we got them into some order in "scrapbooks." But the dates of publication and other details are often characteristically wanting. Elsewhere in the present volume the titles, etc., of the stories are listed. Preceded by those of "One of Cleopatra's Nights," they form a body of literary values which should be rescued from the newspaper files and permanently issued in book-form for the pleasure and instruction of English readers. To do this I have most generously been given permission by Hearn's ever helpful and discriminating friend, Mr. Page M. Baker, editor of the Times-Democrat.

Hearn knew well the difficulties of the translator's art. "One who translates for the love of the original will probably have no reward save the satisfaction of creating something beautiful and perhaps of saving a masterpiece from less reverent hands." So anxious was he to do such work that he was willing to pay the publication expenses. As pertinent, I copy an editorial of his on the subject, which was published in the Times-Democrat, during the period in which he was so busy as a translator:

The New York Nation has been publishing in its columns a number of interesting and severe criticisms upon translations from foreign authors. These translations are generally condemned, and with good specifications of reasons,—notwithstanding the fact that some of them have been executed by persons who have obtained quite a popular reputation as translators. One critic dwells very strongly upon the most remarkable weakness of all the renderings in question;—they invariably fail to convey the colour and grace of the original, even when the meaning is otherwise preserved. Speaking of the translators themselves, the reviewer observes: "There is not one artist among them."

All this is very true; but the writer does not explain the causes of this state of affairs. They are many, no doubt;—the principal fact for consideration being that there is no demand for artistic work in translation. And there is no demand for it, not so much because it is rare and unlikely to be appreciated as because it is dear. Artistic translators cannot afford to work for a song,—neither would they attempt to translate a five-hundred-page novel in three weeks or a month as others do. Again, artistic translators would not care to attach their names to the published translation of a fourth-or fifth-class popular novel. Finally, artistic translations do not obtain a ready market with first-class American publishers, who, indeed, seldom touch domestic translations of foreign fiction, and depend for their translations of European literature upon transatlantic enterprise. Thus the artistic translator may be said to have no field. He may sell his work to some petty publisher, perhaps, but only at a price that were almost absurd to mention;—and the first-class publishers do not care to speculate in American translations at all. We might also add that the translator's task is always a thankless one,—that however superb and laborious his execution, it can never obtain much public notice, nor even so much as public comprehension. The original author will be admired,—the translator unnoticed, except by a few critics.

Moreover, the men capable of making the most artistic translations are usually better employed. The translator of a great French, German, or Italian masterpiece of style, ought, in the eternal fitness of things, to be a man able to write something very artistic in his own tongue. No one seems to doubt that Longfellow was the man to translate Dante,—that Tennyson could parallel Homer (as he has shown by a wonderful effort) in the nineteenth-century English,—that Carlyle re-created Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" by his rendering of it,—that Austin Dobson was the first to teach English readers some of the beauties of Gautier's poetry,—that Swinburne alone could have made François Villon adopt an English garb which exactly fitted him. But the same readers perhaps never gave a thought to the fact that the works of Flaubert, of Daudet, of Droz, of Hugo, of at least a score of other European writers, call for work of an almost equally high class on the part of the translator, and never receive it! What a translation of Daudet could not Henry James give us!—how admirably John Addington Symonds could reproduce for us the Venetian richness of Paul de Saint Victor's style! But such men are not likely to be invited, on either side of the Atlantic, to do such work;—neither are they likely to do it as a labour of love! A splended translation of Flaubert might be expected from several members of what is called "The New England School;" but what Boston publisher would engage his favourite literary man in such pursuits? It is really doubtful whether the men most capable of making artistic translations could afford, under any ordinary circumstances, to undertake much work of the kind, except as a literary recreation. At all events, the English-reading world cannot hereafter expect to obtain its translations from other European languages through the labour of the best writers in its own. The only hope is, that the recklessness shown by publishers in their choice of translators will provoke a reaction, and that such work will be more generously remunerated and entrusted to real experts hereafter.

It is unfortunately true that the translators who work for English publishers are far more competent than those who do similar work in the United States; forasmuch as transatlantic firms are glad to print cheap popular translations, while only inferior American firms care to undertake them. Another obstacle to good translations in the United States is that none of the great literary periodicals will devote space to them. The English and the French magazines and reviews are less conservative, and some very wonderful translations have been published by them. Artistic translation might be admirably developed in this country by the establishment of a new magazine-policy.

The wise reader, if he is also a sincere friend of Hearn, must wish that the correspondence published had been limited to the first volume. Room aplenty in this could have been made for the dozen valuable paragraphs contained in the second. It is not strange that the letters of Hearn worth saving were written before his departure for Japan. He repeatedly had urged that letter-writing both financially and mentally was expensive to the writer. In Japan he was so incessantly busy, much with his teaching and more with his real literary work, that time and will were wanting for that sort of letters which are of interest to the general reader. The interest of the person addressed is another affair. The dreary half-thousand pages of the correspondence of the Japanese time are most disappointing to one who has been thrilled by almost every page of the incomparable letters to Krehbiel and to a few others. Besides the two reasons for this which I have suggested, there are others which may perhaps be evident to some judicious readers, but which at this time may scarcely be plainly stated. At present the trees are so thick that the forest cannot be seen, but some day an amused and an amusing smile of recognition and disgust will curl the lips of the literary critic. There are two other considerations which should be held in mind: One of them was brought to me by a correspondent of Hearn who had frequently noted it; sometimes (has it happened before?) Hearn used his "friend" to whom he was writing, as a sort of method of exercising his own fancy, as a gymnastics in putting his imagination through its paces, or for a preliminary sketching in of notes and reminders to be of possible use in later serious work. Moreover, the plan was of service in rewarding his correspondents for their praise and appreciation. Of a far more substantial character were the letters sometimes written in gratitude for money received. Hearn flattered himself, as we know, that he was without "cunning," but there is at least one exquisitely ludicrous letter in existence which shows an inverted proof of it, in the execution of an Indian war-dance, because of "the ways and means" furnished.

As published, Hearn's letters may be classified as follows: To

Krehbiel	1887 (3); 1878 (5); 1879 (2); 1880 (3); 1881 (4); 1882 (4); 1883 (4); 1884 (13); 1885 (8); 1886 (6); 1887 (4)	56
Hart	1882 (3); 1883 (1)	4
Ball	1882 (2); 1883 (4); 1885 (3)	9
O'Connor	1883 (4); 1884 (2); 1885 (2); 1886 (2); 1887 (2)	12
Albee	1883 (1); 1898 (2)	3
Gould	1887 (5); 1888 (4); 1889 (8)	17
Bisland	1887 (8); 1889 (11); 1890 (3); 1900 (1); 1902 (3); 1903 (9); 1904 (1)	36
Tunison	1889 (1)	1
Chamberlain	1890 (7); 1891 (13); 1895 (22)	42
Nishida	1890 (2); 1891 (2); 1892 (2); 1893 (9); 1894 (2); 1895 (3); 1896 (3); 1897 (2)	25
Hirn	1890 (1); 1902 (5); 1903 (1)	7
Baker	1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894(1); 1895 (3); 1896 (2)	8
Hendrick	1891 (2); 1892 (4); 1893 (10); 1894 (6); 1895 (6); 1896(9); 1897 (7); 1898 (2); 1902 (2)	48
Otani	1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894(1); 1897 (1); 1898 (2); 1900 (1)	7
Ochiai	1893 (2); 1894 (2); 1896 (2)	6
McDonald	1897 (10); 1898 (25); 1899 (19)	54
Fenollosa	1898 (3); 1899 (2)	5
Blank	1898	1

Foxwell	1899	2
Yasuchochi	1901	1
Tanabe	1904	1
Crosby	1904	1
Fujisaki	1904	1
		347

Besides these, the valuable series of "Letters from a Raven," and the sixteen in the same volume "To a Lady" are noteworthy. The latter are of little value either for biography or literature. But the letters to Watkin are so sincere, often childlike, indeed, that they will be prized by the discriminating. Another admirable series, copies of which I have, is made up of letters to Professor R. Matas, of New Orleans. To these it is hoped will sometime be added those which must exist, to Mr. Alden, who was an early and sincere friend. There are a number of unpublished letters to Gould, and the published ones have been so mutilated that they should be correctly republished. Almost anything written by Hearn before he went to Japan, or in some instances reflecting friendships and feelings existing before he sailed, may prove of as inestimable value as most letters written thereafter will probably be found valueless.

It is noteworthy that the first series, edited by Miss Bisland, was commenced in 1877, when Hearn was twenty-seven years of age, and that for many years Mr. Krehbiel was almost his sole correspondent. But the inimitable perfection and preciousness of these fifty-six letters! They are well worth all his other set productions, published or burned, of the same years. Many are singly worth all the rest of our letters. Here the dreamer—and a dreamer he always was until he got out of his cocoon—was sincere, hopeful, planful, as playful as his sombre mind would permit, but always magnificently, even startlingly, unreserved. Remembering that Hearn's mind was essentially an echoing and a colouring mechanism, it is at once a glorious tribute to, and a superlative merit of Mr. Krehbiel to have given the primary and stimulating voice to the always listening dreamer. To have swerved him out of his predestined rôle so much as to make these pages so astonishingly full of musical reverberations, is a tribute to his own musical enthusiasm and power as it is also a demonstration of the echo-like, but fundamentally unmusical, nature of his friend's mind. If only in the final edition of Hearn's works, these letters with selections of some pages from a few others, could be made into a handy, small, and cheap volume for the delighting of the appreciators of literature and of literary character! Comparison of the spiritual and almost spirituelle flashings of these, with the ponderous and banal sogginess of hundreds upon hundreds of other pages of his letters, arouses the profound regret that Hearn to the world was "impossible," that, as he says, he "could not mingle with men," that no other voices ever so intimately reached the heart of him, or of his dreaming. Even here the amazing coloration furnished by "The Dreamer," as he calls himself, makes us at times feel that the magic of the word-artist and colour-mixer was almost superior to the enduring and awakening reality of Mr. Krehbiel. To this friend, as he writes, he spoke of his thoughts and fancies, wishes and disappointments, frailties, follies, and failures, and successes—even as to a brother. And that was not all he saw and heard in "his enchanted City of Dreams."

The slavery to ignoble journalism, what he calls a "really nefarious profession," was to be resolutely renounced from the day of his arrival in New Orleans. It is "a horrid life," he "could not stand the gaslight;" he "damned reportorial work and correspondence, and the American disposition to work people to death, and the American delight in getting worked to death;" he rebelled against becoming a part of the revolving machinery of a newspaper, because "journalism dwarfs, stifles, emasculates thought and style," and he was bound to "produce something better in point of literary execution."

There was also a not frankly confessed resolve to become respectable in other ways, and to be done with a kind of entanglement of which he was painfully conscious in the Cincinnati life. "I think I can redeem myself socially here! I have got into good society;" "it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio," he writes, and he is proud of living in a Latin city. He recognizes what Mr. Krehbiel calls his "peculiar and unfortunate disposition," and which he later sets forth as "a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, variable, nervous disposition." Hearn visits a few friends awhile and then disappears for six months, so that he wishes to be hidden in New York except to Krehbiel and Tunison; he will pay a visit to the others he must see just before leaving town—for he is a "demophobe." He tried a secret partnership in keeping a restaurant, and thought to carry on a little French bookstore. He resolved at different times to go to Europe, to Cuba, to Texas, to Cincinnati, and planned all sorts of occupations.

The indications soon multiply that in more ways than in worldly matters he is at variance with his world. He "regards thought as a mechanical process;" he has "no faith in any faith;" "individual life is a particle of that eternal force of which we know so little;" "Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul;" Jesus is a legend and myth; he is "not a believer in free will, nor in the individual soul," etc. Think of a man writing to a Christian minister, think of a Christian minister receiving without protest a personal letter with this in it: "Nor can I feel more reverence for the crucified deity than for that image of the Hindoo god of light holding in one of his many hands Phallus, and yet wearing a necklace of skulls, etc."

And Hearn, as to ethics, has the courage to write his friend of his convictions: "Passion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the mother of language; its gratification the act of a creator, and the divinest rite of Nature's temple." In other letters, unpublished, that exist, Hearn is morbidly frank as to sexual licence and practices. In tropical cities there is "no time for friendship—only passion for women, and brief acquaintance for men." Without the influence of sexualism there can be no real greatness; "the mind remains arid and desolate," and he quotes approvingly:—"Virginity, Mysticism, Melancholy—three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by the Christ," etc. "I do not find it possible to persuade myself that the 'mad excess of love' should not be indulged in by mankind," introduces a brilliant page upon the theme, ending with, "after all what else do we live for—ephemeræ that we are?" To my protest he wrote, "'Moral' feelings are those into which the sexual instinct does not visibly enter;" and again, "The sexual sense never tells a physical lie. It only tells an ethical one." There is, to be sure, no answer to a man who says such things.

It is astonishing, how conscious and at the same time how careless Hearn was of his characteristics and trends. In 1878 he could coldly prepare to attempt a get-rich-quick scheme, "a fraud, which will pay like hell, an advertising fraud," etc., because "there is no money in honest work." At this time also he knew that his own wandering passion was "the strongest of all," and that his deepest desire was "to wander forever here and there until he should get old and apish and grey and die." His misfortunes he confessed were of his own making because it was absolutely out of the question for him to "keep any single situation for any great length of time," hating the mere idea of it, "impossible to stay anywhere without getting into trouble." "No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I," he correctly avows. He recognizes that "the unexpected obstacle to success was usually erected by himself."

He acknowledges his ignorance and escapes from it and from the labour, expense, and duty of scholarship by flying, as many others have done, to the world of Imagination, which alone is left to him. "It allows of a vagueness of expression which hides the absence of real knowledge, and dispenses with the necessity of technical precision and detail." He "never reads a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination." Knowing that he has not true and real genius, he "pledges himself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits my temperament," and he "hopes to succeed in attracting some little attention." The monstrous, the enormous, and the lurid, is sought in the letters. The sentence at the bottom of page 226, Volume One of the "Life and Letters," and the ghastly story, pages 322-323, show the gruesome still much alive, and page 306 that blood, fury, and frenzy haunt his nightmare dreams. "In history one should only seek the extraordinary, the monstrous, the terrible; in mythology the most fantastic and sensuous, just as in romance," And yet he defends himself as a lover of Greek art, detests "the fantastic beauty that is Gothic," yet prides himself on being Arabesque. Even the love of Beaudelaire creeps in, and the brutal, horrible photograph of Gautier is "grander than he imagined." Of course to such a mind Matthew Arnold is a "colossal humbug"—and worse.

With increasing frequency are repeated the complaints of disillusionment; he is frightened at the loss even of the love of the beautiful, and his friend tries in vain to rouse him from his ghost-life and dreaming. There are absurd excuses why he cannot work; when among beautiful things he cannot write of them, when he is away he is longing for them; there are months when he cannot do anything, and a little thing is produced with great pain and labour. "The old enthusiasm has completely died out of me." The people and the city are adequately cursed, and upon the debilitating climate is laid a proper and ever-repeated anathema. He loathes the North, especially New York City, "shudders at the bare idea of cold;" he yearns and pines for a still more tropical country which he knows may kill him, and which came near doing so. The Wanderlust is upon him as passages on pages 183, 193, 196, 197, 207, 215, 223, 224, 398 of Volume One of the "Life and Letters" illustrate. At last he is off for Martinique, where work and even thought are still more impossible because of the benumbing heat.

Here follows a list of the unsigned editorials contributed by Hearn to his paper. It is made up from two of the scrap-books left me, and is entitled:

SUNDAY AND SPECIAL EDITORIALS BY LAFCADIO
HEARN FOR THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT, 1885-1887.

1. The "Peronospora Ferrani" and Cholera Vaccination.
2. Literary Pessimism.
3. "The Song Celestial."
4. The Canonization of the Mahdi.
5. "Successor of Tamerlane."
6. The World's Journalism.
7. A Scientific Novelty.
8. The Jewish Question in Europe (Suppressed by the management).
9. Russian Literature Abroad.
10. The European Trouble.
11. Missionaries as Linguists.
12. Courbet.
13. Poetry and Pay.
14. The Present and Future of India.
15. An Archaeological Novel.
16. An Evolutional History.
17. A New Pompeii.
18. Archæology in Cambodia.
19. The Great "I-Am."
20. A Terrible Novel.
21. The Latin Church in the East and Bismarck.
22. English Policy in China.
23. The Fear of Death.
24. A Danger to Egypt—The Senousiya.
25. Archaeological News from China.
26. Icelandic Prospects.
27. A Great English Physician.
28. Academical Triumphs.
29. The Magician of Paris.
30. Tolstoi's Vanity of Wisdom.
31. "Minos."
32. Newspapers and Religion.
33. Minos.
34. A Concord Compromise.
35. De Mercier on Dante.
36. The Origin of Christmas.
37. "Immortality" according to Dr. Holland.
38. The Future of Idealism.
39. "Solitude."
40. Dr. Holland's Defenders.
41. The Religion of Suffering.
42. The Ruins of Carthage.
43. A Defence of Pessimism.
44. Over-Education in Germany.
45. Decadence as a Fine Art.
46. Use of the Eye or the Ear in Learning Languages.
47. The Shadow of the "Light of Asia."
48. The Jew upon the Stage.
49. Some Theosophical Iconoclasm.
50. "Hamlet's Note-Book."
51. The Invasion of the Desert.
52. Resurrected Æstheticism.
53. Translations.
54. Nihilistic Literature in the United States.
55. Some Human Frailty.
56. An Art-Reformer.
57. Some Notes on Creole Literature.
58. The Scientific Value of Creole.
59. "l'Œuvre."
60. A Havanese Romance.
61. Some Supposed Sanscrit Translations.
62. The Omnivorous Newspaper.
63. A Religious Nightmare.
64. Joaquin Miller.
65. Pictures vs. Text.
66. "Follow the Donkey Path."
67. A Sketch of the Creole Patois.
68. In Spain.
69. Chinese Belief in God.
70. "Towards the Gulf."
71. Tennyson's Locksley Hall.
72. "Doesn't Want Any Progress."
73. The Howard Memorial Library—A Letter from Charles Dudley Warner.
74. A Definitive Rossetti.
75. The Chinese Future.
76. Artistic Value of Myopia.
77. Colours and Emotions.

CHAPTER V.—AT MARTINIQUE

THE lure of the Sea and of the Unknown was upon Hearn during the entire stay at New Orleans. How deeply it entered his heart is shown in a fragment rescued by his friend, Dr. Matas, which has been kindly sent me. The copy is in print, but when and where it was published we have been unable to learn. It was probably written in 1885 or 1886. As it gives glimpses at once into Hearn's mind, of his fateful desire to roam, of his Nature-love, and, better, of his growing mastery of technic and imagery, I reproduce herewith the fragment, which he entitled:

GULF WINDS

Golden oranges piled up in bins,—apples of the Southern Hesperides;—a medley of meridional tongues,—silky Latin tongues and their silkier patois; Chinese buyers yellow as bananas, quadroons with skin like dead gold; swarthy sailors from the Antilles; sharp odours of fruit freshly disembarked;—all the semi-tropical sights and sounds of the French market. I stood beside an orange-bin; and priced the fruit. Fifty cents a hundred! While wondering how much the fruit-vender's profit could possibly be, I was insensibly attracted by something unusual in his face—a shadow of the beauty of the antique world seemed to rest upon it. "Are you not a Greek?" I asked, for there was no mistaking the metoposcopy of that head. Yes; he was from Zante—first a sailor, now a fruit-vender; some day, perhaps, he would be a merchant.

It is among those who sell, not among those who buy, that the most curious studies of human nature and of the human face are to be made in the French market. These dealers are by no means usually French, but they are mostly from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant—from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of Southern Europe. They are wanderers, who have wandered all over the face of the earth to find rest at last in this city of the South; they are sailors who have sailed all seas, and sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, and finally anchored their lives by the levee of New Orleans. The Neapolitan Italian, the Spaniard, the Corsican, the Levantine Greek, seek rest from storm here, in a clime akin to their own and under a sky as divinely blue, and at a port not far distant from their beloved sea. For these Levantine sailors hate dusty inland cities and the dry air of the Great West.

If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea;—if, in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, which none can hear without awe, and which no musician can learn;—if you have ever watched wonderingly the far sails of the fishing-vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or silver under the moon, or golden in the glow of sunrise;—if you once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers, and received the Ocean-god's christening, the glorious baptism of salt,—then, perhaps, you know only too well why these sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes within the heart of the land. Twenty years may have passed since your ears last caught the thunder of that mighty ode of hexameters which the sea has always sung and will sing forever, since your eyes sought the far line where the vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of rolling water,—since you breathed the breath of the ocean, and felt its clear ozone living in your veins like an elixir. Have you forgotten the mighty measure of that mighty song? have you forgotten the divine saltiness of that unfettered wind? Is not the spell of the sea strong upon you still?

So that when the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, there comes to you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, "Come!"

So that when the silent night comes,—you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean-shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, an ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of that sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and "the city sickening on its own thick breath."

And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the midst of the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea might come upon them in the night, and phantom winds call wildly to them in their sleep, and they might wake to find themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of the breakers.

Sometimes, I doubt not, these swarthy sellers of fruit, whose black eyes sparkle with the sparkle of the sea, and whose voices own the tones of ocean-winds, sicken when a glorious breeze from the Gulf enters the city, shaking the blossoms from the magnolia-trees and the orange-groves. Sometimes, I doubt not, they forsake their Southern home when the dream comes upon them, and take ship for the Spanish Main. Yet I think most men may wake here from the dreams of the sea, and rest again. It is true that you cannot hear the voice of the hoary breakers in the moonlight,—only the long panting of the cotton-presses, the shouting of the boats calling upon each other through the tropical night, and the ceaseless song of night-birds and crickets. But the sea-ships, with their white wings folded, are slumbering at the wharves; the sea-winds are blowing through the moon-lit streets, and from the South arises a wondrous pale glow, like the far reflection of the emerald green of the ocean. So that the Greek sailor, awaking from the vision of winds and waves, may join three fingers of his right hand, after the manner of the Eastern Church, and cross himself, and sleep again in peace.

Hearn left New Orleans in July, 1887, and was soon settled at St. Pierre, Martinique. His letters to Dr. Matas form the principal sources of information concerning himself and his work during his stay there. From them I choose a few selections which bear upon his literary labours. At first, of course, all is perfection:

I am absolutely bewitched, and resolved to settle down somewhere in the West Indies. Martinique is simply heaven on earth. You must imagine a community whose only vices are erotic. There are no thieves, no roughs, no snobs. Everything is primitive and morally pure—except in the only particular where purity would be out of harmony with natural conditions. As for the climate, it is divine—though this is the worst season.

And I have begun to hate all that is energetic, swift, rapid in thought or action, all rivalry, all competition, all striving in the race of success. It is just enough to live here: no, it is too much!—it is more than any ordinary human being deserves to enjoy. It makes one feel like crying for joy just to look about one.

Couldn't I induce you to abandon the beastly civilization of the U. S., and live somewhere down here forever more,—where everybody is honest and good-natured and courteous, and where everything is divine? Man was not intended to work in this part of the world: while you are here, you cannot quite persuade yourself you are awake,—it is a dream of eternal beauty,—all the musky winds, all the flower-months of Paradise! New Orleans is the most infernal hole in the entire Cosmos. Don't live in it! Confound fame and wealth and reputation and splendour. You don't need any of these things here; they are superfluous; they are obsolete; they are nuisances; they are living curses. Settle here. Humming-birds will fly into your chamber to wake you up. What on earth you can find to live for in the U.S. I am now at a loss to see. You'll get old there;—here you will remain eternally young: the palms distil Elixir Vitæ.

But it is simply foolishness to write to you—because I can't write about this place. All ambition to write has been paralyzed—let Nature do the writing—in green, azure and gold!

Lafcadio Hearn.
From a Photograph taken at Martinique, August 24th, 1888.

(Letter from St. Pierre, July 30, 1887.)

I am not at all sure of my literary future,—I do not mean pecuniarily, for I never allow that question to seriously bother me: to write simply to make money is to be a d——d fraud, so long as one can aim at higher things. But I do not feel the same impulses and inspirations and power to create;—I have been passing through a sort of crisis,—out of enthusiasm into reality and I do not feel so mentally strong as I ought. The climate had much to do with it in the beginning, causing a serious weakness of memory;—that is now passed; but I feel as if mon âme avait perdu ses ailes. Perhaps something healthier and stronger may come of it; but in the meanwhile I suffer from great disquietude, and occasional very black ideas; and praise sounds to me like a malicious joke, because I feel that my work has been damnably bad. The fact that I know it has been bad, encourages me to believe I may do better, and find confidence in myself.

I have enough MS. for a volume of French colonial sketches, and do not think I will be able to do much more with Martinique for the present; but I also have accumulated material out of which something will probably grow. I would now like to attempt some Spanish studies.

Northern air will do me good, though I do not like the idea of living in it. But when, after all this stupid, brutal, never-varying heat, you steam North, and the constellations change, and the moon stands up on her feet instead of lying on her back lasciviously,—and the first grand whiff of cold air comes like the advent of a Ghost,—Lord! how one's brain suddenly clears and thrills into working order. It is like a new soul breathed into your being through the nostrils—after the Creator's fashion of animating his Adam of clay.

Perhaps you think I have been a poor correspondent. You can scarcely imagine the difficulties of maintaining a friendly chat by letter while trying to do literary work here. Most people who attempt literature here either give it up after a short time, or go to the graveyard: there are a few giants,—like Dr. Rufz de Lavison (who never finished his Études nevertheless), Davey the historian; Dessalles who suddenly disappeared leaving his history incomplete. But I fear I am no giant. At 2 or 2.30 p.m. if you try to write, your head feels as if a heated feather pillow had been stuffed into your skull. To write at all one must utilize the morning;—that is given to make the pot boil: one can write letters only at intervals, paragraph by paragraph, or between solid chapters of downright wearing-out work.

Nevertheless, one learns to love this land so much as to be quite willing to abandon anything and everything to live in it. As in the old Sunday-school hymn, "only man is vile:" nature and Woman are unspeakably sweet.

I suppose I will not be able to meet you in New York this fall: you will be too busy. Next summer it will be possible, I hope. Perhaps you will have the pleasure of a little book or two from me during the cold weather: I will revise things in New York. It has been a horrible agony to have my stuff printed without being able to see the proofs, and full of mistakes. "Chita" has been a great literary success—contrary to expectation. I find success is not decided by the press, nor by first effect on the public: opinions of literary men count much more, and these have been better than I imagined they could be. (1887)

Well, I am caught! The tropics have me, for better or worse, so long as I live. Life in a great northern city again would be a horror insupportable. Yet I have had great pain here. I have been four months without a cent of money where nobody would trust me: you know what that means, if you have ever had a rough-and-tough year or two: otherwise you could not imagine it. I have had disillusions in number. I find worst of all, there is no inspiration in the tropics,—no poetry, no aspiration, no self-sacrifice, no human effort. Now, that I can go where I like, do as I please—for I have won the fight after all,—I still prefer one year of Martinique to a thousand years of New York. What is it? Am I demoralized; or am I simply better informed than before? I don't really know. (1887)

New York, September 29, 1887.[12]

[ [12] Written during a brief stay in New York, whither he had gone in the fall of 1887.

Dear Friend Matas:—I am going back to the tropics,—probably for many years. My venture has been more successful than I ever hoped; and I find myself able to abandon journalism, with all its pettinesses, cowardices, and selfishnesses, forever. I am able hereafter to devote myself to what you always said was my forte: the study of tropical Nature—God's Nature,—violent, splendid, nude, and pure. I never hoped for such fortune. It has come unasked. I am almost afraid to think it is true. I am afraid to be happy!

c/o Dr. George M. Gould,
119 South Seventeenth St.,
Philadelphia, June 5, 1889.

Dear Friend Matas:—Your letter of March 21 only reached me to-day, June 5th; but made me very glad to get it. I have been back from the West Indies about three weeks—do not know how long I shall stay. It seemed like tearing my heart out to leave Martinique; and though I am now in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, among dear friends, and with the splendid spectacle before me of man's grandest efforts—not a wild cyclone of electricity and iron like New York, but a great quiet peace—the tropical Nature with all its memories haunts me perpetually,—draws my thought back again over the azure sea and under the turquoise sky to the great palms and the volcanic hills and the beautiful brown women. I know I shall have to go back to the tropics sooner or later.

The effect of the climate, as you know, is deadly to mental work. Physically, however, I felt better in it,—less nervous than I ever was before. Only one's will to work is broken down; and it is better only to collect material there to work up elsewhere. That sort of work I am busy at just now. I have a signed contract for publication of "Chita" in book-form; and the result of my two years' absence will be forthcoming in a volume of larger size.

You know Philadelphia, I suppose, the beautiful city; and I suppose you know that physicians here form the leaders of, and give the tone to, social life. It seems to me but just that they should,—representing the highest intellectual rank of civilization when they are really worthy of the profession.

... As for other people wondering what has become of me; that is just what I want. I do not care to have any one know what I am doing till it is done.... I have happily got over a sort of crisis, however, which isolated me more than I would have liked to be isolated from the world at large: the distrust of myself.

Handwriting of Hearn in 1889. face page 63.

Concerning the value of Hearn's Martinique work, I am permitted to quote from a letter written to him on May 24, 1890, by the late Edmund C. Stedman,—and there could be no better judge and critic:

"I will not leave without telling you how much I am your debtor for the fascinating copious record of your life in the Windward Islands, and for your 'Youma'—both of which I take with me to 'Kelp Rock'—and which we shall know by heart ere long. The 'Two Years' came when I was 'moving' in New York, etc.,—so that books and letters, unacknowledged, perforce have piled up on my table. I am grateful for your remembrance and your gifts. No book could please me more than your 'Two Years.' Those Islands are my Hesperides—I had begun a series of poems and lyrics, cast in the Caribees, but your prose poems put mine to shame—and I am glad to listen to your music and leave my own unsung."

CHAPTER VI.—"GETTING A SOUL"

SHORT though it was in time, the Philadelphia visit in 1889 has a value long in significance, that deserves epitomization. To begin with, it was Hearn's first experience of anything that might be called home-life. Its result was a softening and normalizing of him both as to character and as to manner, which was most evident. Secondly, and as he chose to put it, I "gave him a soul." By this poetic paraphrase he meant that I had succeeded in bringing to his recognition the existence of Freedom in what he thought determinism;—that intelligence, purpose, and beneficence lie behind biology, and that human beings are not always, and may never be wholly, the slaves of the senses, and the dupes of desire. Beauty itself, which he so widely sought, I asked him to note, is a needless, harmful, and even impossible thing in a world of adamantine logic and necessity. Above all, I demonstrated the existence of Duty, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," not only in the abstract, but in concrete lives, in social and historic exemplifications, and that only by means of men and women who obey conscience is social and historic progress brought about. They who have not seen that can have no "soul;" they who do see it, have soul, durable or great according to the clearness of the seeing and the obedience to the implication. Fully and freely Hearn acknowledged the vision, and never afterward could he be wholly the same as he had been before. But the Providence of the Oriental and semi-barbarous is Improvidence, and their God is Fate. Hearn came to hate, or to pretend to hate, the truth which had now slipped through his spiritual eyes, but he could not undo or outroot it entirely; "henceforth by the vision splendid is on his way attended." Thirdly, this new viewpoint, this new spirit or soul, I got incorporated in a little art-work, or ethical study—"Karma," published in Lippincott's Magazine, May, 1890, after Hearn had gone to Japan. To the world and without the knowledge of its making, "Karma" must have seemed an illogical and even impossible thing for Hearn to have written. It is apparently the sole work which he ever wrote, created de novo and without the data having been found or brought to him from without. But it was only a seeming creation. It was only the telling, the colouring, that was his, as in his other tales before or after. In our long walks and talks in the Park at night, we wrought out the title, the datum, and the whole trend of the story. He rebelled, but I held him to the task, which he finally executed with frank and artistic loyalty. The pride or indifference, even the dislike, of its readers, the writer, or inspirer, is as nothing compared with the fact that by it and from it Hearn learned something of love and duty that had never before been a living reality to him. What an infinite distance it was removed from anything dreamed during the Cincinnati period, or to be derived from Flaubert, Gautier, or Beaudelaire! After that his future work could never be, and never was, what it was from the writing, "Everything you feel you would not like me to know." I do not think there is exaggeration of the importance of the story, and what led up to its writing, in saying that it was the greatest of the turning-points in his life, and that directly because of it the magnificent works of the Japanese period were profoundly influenced through the attitude of mind thereby gained.

Concerning the heroine of the tale Hearn wrote me:

Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it. It would have to be sexual. Never could find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood, which in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about sex, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect natures inspire a love that is a fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive—pregnant with future pains innumerable.

But, fourthly, that in which I feel as great a pride, is compelling him to go to Japan. Others could have reported for lurid yellow journalism, others might possibly have translated as well as he, others could have told the West Indian stories, but—not even his beloved Lowell—only Hearn could have written of the Japanese life and soul as Hearn has done. He had no thought of the journey when I showed him his duty and his opportunity. By argument, pleading, almost compulsion, I at last wearied his opposition, and he went, with reluctance, after months of halting in detested New York City in which he learned by bitter experience that it was no place for him, and that his beloved tropics should not be again sought.

How disappointed he was in his New York friends and prospects may be gathered from the following excerpt taken from one of his letters to me. I had used all my influence to keep him from a stay in the city. He wrote as follows:

Dear Gooley, your advice is good from your way of looking at it; but I am much stronger in New York than you imagine, and my future in it is plain and perfect sailing if I keep good health. I am only embarrassed for the moment. I am quite a lion here, and could figure in a way you would hardly guess, if I were not such a man of tentacles. I am not afraid of the cold—though it disheartens fancy a little; but I shall leave fancy alone for a while. No, Gooley, dear Gooley, I shall make my way in New York—don't be afraid for me.

He soon became convinced that I was right and finally resumed the journey unwillingly. The end has justified the means and the sacrifices. It is plain that the Japanese period and work crown his life-labours splendidly, and that his masterful pictures of Japanese characters, traditions, and religion now constitute one of our most precious literary treasures. They have also been of profound service to Japan.

When he left my home, he, of his own accord, asked me to care for his library, then in the home of Mr. Alden at Metuchen, New Jersey, who two years previously had consented to take charge of it, and had paid shipping expenses, insurance, etc. None can imagine anything ungenerous or unkind in Mr. Alden. An old Cincinnati acquaintance characterizes Hearn's action in the matter as "a swindle." I have no knowledge or hint how it was or could be of that nature. Hearn wrote all the letters, and made all the arrangements to have the books sent to me. Mr. Alden authorizes me to say:

"I was perfectly convinced at the time of the transfer of the library to Dr. Gould that he had no desire for its possession, and that the transfer was made solely in accordance with Mr. Hearn's request. I am quite sure that Dr. Gould fully explained the matter to me at the time. I feel sure that Dr. Gould acted precisely as I should have done if I had retained possession of the library; that is, readily giving it up to any legitimate claimant." I found the books of no value to me, and they surely have been an expense. I tried, later, to prevail upon Hearn to allow me to ship them to him in Japan, but I never received any replies to my letters. He asked for the catalogue, some of the old books, and beside these, at his request, a number of expensive new books were at various times bought and sent to him. I suspect that as there was not a book on Japan in the collection, and as he had a plethora of data at hand such as he wanted, the library gathered with so much love and enthusiasm was no longer of use to him, especially under the conditions of his life there.

Hearn gained strength and power as regards both truth and art, in so far as he was true to the better in himself; all his trouble and his weakness were born out of the lower self he would not, or could not, sacrifice. His worship of the blood-curdling and revolting gave him some temporary vogue among the readers of yellow newspaperdom, but not until that was renounced for the compromise of the "odd and ghostly" did he begin to show an ability to reach something more worthy in human nature than the degenerate reporter catered to. The next step in advance was the cultivation of the artistic pornography of the sensualistic French story-writer. Not until he renounced this did he once more come to the something of more use to the reading world which fills the Martinique epoch. His disinclination to go to Japan, I more than suspect, was owing to a half consciousness that there was in that nation too much civilization, too good character, and even too much religion to suit the tastes which had been uppermost in motiving his past literary labours. His going into utter, illogical, and absurd captivity to the atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer was a sorry sacrifice of his nobler office and better destiny to the fate that relentlessly dogged his footsteps. He was forced into all the humanity and beneficence possible to him by Japanese restraint, art, and truth. His cries of disillusion over the Japanese were largely the anger of the semi-barbaric wanderer held by family ties, paternity, etc., when he found himself prevented from again seeking the faraway tropical pseudo-paradises of peoples but one remove from savagery.

In the pre-Japanese periods only the lurid, the monstrous, the enormous, only hot crime, and sexual passion, could excite his liveliest interest, and all great literature was as much ignored as if it did not exist. There is not a hint in all he did that he had read a line of the great creators of literature,—the Greek dramatists, Dante, Goethe, Shakespere, and a hundred more; he could not give time to read, much less study them. His pretension of ability to teach English literature was soon recognized even by the Japanese, and it is well that over-zealous friends did not secure him a lectureship at Cornell University. To be sure, he never had time to study even the history of his own science and art,—but he never would have done so, it is plain, if leisure and opportunity had been offered him. The ideal and the rewards of scholarship never entered his mind. Perhaps it was best for his peculiar office and proficiency that he allowed all erudition to go unlooked-upon. And yet if he had been possessed of sufficient virility and objectivity of mind to have learned the Japanese language, what would the labour not have been worth? That he could not read a Japanese book or newspaper after fourteen years of life among the people is most disconcerting. It is a tribute to the amazing delicacy and receptiveness of his mind that while he could not speak to his wife or children in their own tongue, he should still have so accurately caught the Japanese spirit and so admirably conveyed it to us.

The history of Hearn's ghoulish pleasure in the gruesome and sensualistic, runs from the tan-yard horror and Cincinnati reportorial days, through the translated stories of the New Orleans epoch, to his "St. Anthony." In "Stray Leaves" it is but little softened, and yet the atmosphere is brightening. It glitters and flashes like vengeful lightning about the clouds of his mind with the Martinique epoch, etc.; but in the Japanese writing even the "Mountain of Skulls" and other stories are so far removed from reality that our disgust sinks to a smile of sighing wonder that the gruesome could still be so loved by him. It is only a few of the brutal and a small brutalized public that seeks such contes drolatiques (without Balzac's wit, satire, and power, of course), and so again perforce, Hearn was weaned from his morbidities. Dominated by his developing art and also by the need to sell his writings, he thus rose, partly by the command of his readers, to the choice of less and less repulsive themes and methods, and, awed by the Japanese spirit of gentleness and beauty, he finally endowed their national soul-life with a prismatic glory which they themselves had hardly suspected.

Hearn deserted the god of religion, and, except in one respect, he was faithless to the god of ethics. He was, therefore, without any divinity. For a mind that had no creative ability, that must have its subjects furnished to it, a mind whose sole function was to colour the data chosen or given from without,—this inner emptiness could only be deceived by but could not be satisfied with the inner emptiness of Spencerism. He acknowledged that religion was the mother of all civilization, arts, and laws, and that all social systems, arts, and laws, antique or modern, were begotten and nurtured by ethics,—and yet there was no reality in, no reason for the existence of either religion or ethics in this world of mechanics and of fatalism, grim and inexorable.

Hearn speaks somewhere of his aspiration to be considered a "thinker," and once he praises "science" as a source of data for working into the art forms of his beloved poetic prose. But science to him was as impossible as was he to polite society; Spencer gave him leave, he thought, to consider his atheism, irreligion, and sensualisticism as scientifically authorized, and logically justified. He was always hankering after the old heathen, even savage, gods of his father and mother; and every time he went Fantee with them, he came back to a saner world weakened and still more at war with himself. He always sought an impossible world where Teutonic worth and honour could supply a decadent Latin, with half-savage languor and never failing delights of the senses and of art,—art which, in the last analysis, was his only god. But his tragedy was that he always hastened to turn his god into a fetich, while even his mind caught disquieting glimpses of the awful truth that all genuine worship abjures fetichism. As sensualism is the superstition of love, so fetichistic art is the superstition of true æsthetics.

For the most part, minds are mechanical not chemical compoundings, or if chemic, they are in very unstable equilibrium. There are strange and wayward traits, illogic and unfused to unity with the others. There may be psychopathic and isolation wards in the psyche, "retreats," and all manner of diseases of individual organs. Most people go Fantee, often or seldom, and are able to hide their fetichisms from even their best friends. If we observe ourselves at all, most of us wonder at the curious mix of self-contradictories in ourselves. The few whose souls and bodies are fused to clear-cut unity, the component metal melted to harmony in the foundry of Fate and of Purpose,—these clang loyally in absolute and precise tone-colour. In commoner folk the failure of the flux, and the flaws in the casting, have only a social significance, but with the Hearns, with thinkers and writers, the affair has an infinite purport.

Hearn could never make his writings and his art impulses square with his beloved materialistic, deterministic philosophy. He did not believe in soul or in souls, and yet his soul was always treating of souls, and showing the invisible thread of continuity which links souls to Soul. Therefore he is always happiest when his daimon breaks from the restraint of theory and fate and pictures the play of free spirit, of soul unconquered by fate, of life victorious over death in some sad way or bright.

Concerning Hearn's treatment of friends, editors, and publishers, as it bears sharply upon his literary character and productivity, as little as may or must be said: He was under bonds to Fate to abuse worst the majority of his friends who were most magnanimous, helpful, and kind to him personally, or who were most discriminating and encouraging toward his art and artistic ideals. To his former Cincinnati comrades, except the old printer-friend, he scarcely ever wrote after he left them, and the most faithful of these recently writes me: "I never pretended to be a friend to him; I was merely one to whom he resorted when all the rest cast him out. He never found me wanting, but he got few letters from me, and none that were flattering." "I used to love Matas" are Hearn's pitiful words. It is with sorrow and pain that we note the sudden cessation in 1887 of the letters to Krehbiel. This noble friend had drawn from Hearn a beautiful world of play and enduring memories, and one may be more than sure that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed. Baker had been his most helpful and best friend, and yet for a fancied wrong Hearn wrote him a letter filled with insult and ruffianism which a gentleman could not answer, hardly forgive, and never forget. Did Hearn know anybody of character in the West Indies? To the greatest of American editors, the one who "discovered" him and introduced him to a national and international audience, who treated him with a sweet and gracious benignity, even after a shamelessness that is indescribable—to this good man there is not a published letter, although many, and many more, must exist. One day while at my house, Hearn rushed to his room, seized the man's picture on the wall, tore it in a hundred pieces, and danced and spat upon it in a furious rage. In subsequent letters to me he explained his hatred—how he broke his engagements, how he borrowed money from his loathed and insulted friend, how he got credit through him from his tailor, etc. Gently the abused one bore it all and without the least remonstrance, writing me, "Hearn has utterly cast me off; I was loath to part with him." Professor Chamberlain and others kindly explain the curious morbid psychology which Hearn had exhibited towards them. To the last, love and trust breathed from Hearn's letters to me, and yet I learn that to others long afterward he wrote of me with bitterness and malevolent injustice. And yet he had written me after I saw him for the last time, in this way: "Please don't write me at all, or expect me to write, for some months. I do not need any money. I have a good deal on my mind, and am apt, in consequence, to do very stupid or very unkind things in an unlucky moment." And then he wrote: "No, dear Gooley, I will never be indifferent to you! Never think that; I understand better than you suppose. If I am silent at intervals, never doubt me, dear teacher and brother; and you will find everything come right." How often is the pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving way to foolish, needless, and degrading inherited instincts at the expense of the higher life and usefulness! As to some who ludicrously boast of the long continuance of an intimate friendship, there are many letters of Hearn extant and unpublished which blow out that vanity with an amusing smile. The matter, generally, might not have so real an importance were it not that the publishing of literature has a vast deal to do with literature, and, closely examined, Hearn's quarrels with editors, publishers, and the public, is a matter that reaches out astonishingly both as regards himself, his books, and the interest in him, as well as beyond the question of Hearn or of any or all of his friends. Until one silent man consents to speak—which may never be—the discussion of the essence of the affair cannot be set forth in any detail. Passages in Hearn's letters relating thereto should never have been published, or a hundred other things should have been as frankly published. When such publicity shall exist the reasons will be manifest why one publisher destroyed an entire fresh edition of one book of Hearn, why another acted differently, why one is praised or praises himself, why others are blamed, why some are silent although a word would end the injustice, etc. One phase may be noted in passing:—Whatever Hearn's rights or wrongs as to the author's relations with publishers and editors, it was beyond the ken of his mind that one who may gloriously sacrifice all his own temporal blessings in striving after artistic excellence, has no right to ask the same altruism of those engaged in the publishing business. Hearn blamed the crude world, and, for him, its representatives in the persons of editors and their masters, the publishers, for wishing a certain kind of literature. As well blame the bookseller for not sending the book you had not ordered. He who deliberately chooses to give the world a literature he knows it does not want, must accept the rejection and editing of his manuscripts, and the absence of the world's cheques. He chose poverty and may not abuse them who allowed his choice to be realized. It is sad enough, but it is more than childish to grumble, more than ignoble to rail.

The search for "inspiration," as he called it, was with Hearn constant and lifelong. Thus, early in his career, he wrote to his friend, Dr. Matas:

So I wait for the poet's Pentecost—the inspiration of Nature—the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers—with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes bathed in this azure and gold air—saturated with the perfume of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed—vivifying, illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion—the sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple. You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ....

And again he wrote:

I think I must get inspiration. The real secret of art is feeling. The highest form of that feeling is that which the splendour of Nature gives—the thrill and awe of terrible beauty. This is that inexplicable communication of the mind with the Unknowable that has created the religious sense. Said a friend to me yesterday, who is not a believer:—"I stood in the Alps at sunrise, and I knew what religion meant." And I think that passage in Wilson on Fetichism superb where he says that the sight of the splendid sky first created the religious sense. Terribly perverted this sense has been, no doubt; but it belongs, I fancy, to those things which are eternal, and will have many a glorious avatar before our planet floats off into the cemetery of dead worlds. It is, I believe, the most powerful possible motive for true modern poetry—in harmony with science and scientific faith; and that is what I am going to look for.

Such quotations could be multiplied indefinitely, but toward the end they become begging, and moaning in character. The "inspiration" is diligently hunted, hungrily waited for; at last the failure in its coming grows pitiful and tragic. For what is inspiration? If, with the fatal fashion of our fashionable fatalism, we think "we have outgrown all that," all that which was real and genuine inspiring, we at least cannot outgrow that which bred the belief in the inspiring, the trust in spirit and in spiritual truths and forces. Is it all primitive childishness, this faith in a real breathing-in of the higher life into our more carnal hearts and minds? Far from it! It is the veriest of verities, and the deniers of the conditions of inspiration dry up the springs of that "inspiration" which they so hungrily seek. The semblance cannot be without the reality. It will not come, lasting and inexhaustible, by any trick of literary technic. Out of the light of common day is not born that which never was on any sea or shore. Place, time, circumstance, are not, as Hearn thought, the gods of "Inspiration." "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and even a heathen god would hardly visit the altar with his sacred fire if the priests mocked at the power and the very existence of the deity. It is most plain that Hearn early and zealously studied the Bible—hundreds of allusions bear witness of the fact—and that he learned from it the revivification of words, the use of phrase, metaphor, belief, something of the art of reaching in toward the depths of men's moral and religious nature and experience: but all, just so evidently, as a literary art, a tour de force, the skill of the expert workman, handling them as symbols for the sake of the skill, while smiling scornfully at any belief in their reality. Language is the most spirit-like creation of man's mind, the thing nearest him, woven out of his own soul-substance, instinct with his life, haunted with his love, his hate, his suffering. Playing with words, using them as art-stuff, regardless of the experience and love and suffering which gave them conceiving and gives them quickening, is likely to bring upon the artist a sad revenge. Pleading in vain for "inspiration," Hearn died a score or more of years before he should have died.

It should be emphasized that Hearn had but one possible way, chosen or compelled, to make a living. His terrible myopia shut him out from every calling except that of a writer. Moreover, leaving aside the danger to his little vision from so much ocular labour, he had other and almost insurmountable handicaps as a poet or maker of literature: He had no original thing to say, for he was entirely without creative power, and had always to borrow theme and plot. Then he had never seen form, knew almost nothing of it as it exists out there, so that his sole technic was that of a colourist, and also to endow our dead and dying words with life—a "ghostly" life it was, and as he chose it to be—but living it assuredly was. That he over-coloured his pictures, that he over-sensualized his words, of this there is no question—but monotones and senescents that we are, let us not smile too superciliously! Let us learn; and above all let us enjoy!

For, his alone was the palette of the painter of the afterglow of Earth's last sunset. And his the unique miracle of clothing with the hues of a hopeless rainbow, the faint reverberations of bells far sunk in the wreck and wrack of ruined centuries; of reintoning the prayers of Nirvâna-entering souls; of remoaning dear ancient and expiring griefs; of seeing with shut eyes the sad smiles of never-answered loves and never-meeting lovers. With him, hushed, we hearken to Muezzin Bilâl's call from his tower, to the broken sobs of a dancing-girl's passion, or to the plaintive beggings of dying babes for the cold breasts of dead mothers.

CHAPTER VII.—"IN GHOSTLY JAPAN"

PERHAPS I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt Japan had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during the stay with me. Beyond question, Mr. Lowell's volume had a profound influence in turning his attention to Japan and greatly aided me in my insistent urging him to go there. In sending the book Hearn wrote me this letter:

Gooley!—I have found a marvellous book,—a book of books!—a colossal, splendid, godlike book. You must read every line of it. Tell me how I can send it. For heaven's sake don't skip a word of it. The book is called "The Soul of the Far East," but its title is smaller than its imprint.

Hearneyboy.

P.S.—Let something else go to H—, and read this book instead. May God eternally bless and infinitely personalize the man who wrote this book! Please don't skip one solitary line of it, and don't delay reading it,—because something, much! is going to go out of this book into your heart and life and stay there! I have just finished this book and feel like John in Patmos,—only a d——d sight better. He who shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off and his name blotted out of the Book of Life.[13]

[ [13] Mr. Percival Lowell's book soon reached me containing the inscription: "To George M. Gould, with best love of his spiritual pupil, L. H." I have intentionally retained colloquialisms in these excerpts, the indications of our familiarity, etc., to give a glimpse into the heart of the affectionate and sweet-natured man.

There is not much to say about the Japanese period. The splendid books speak for themselves. There is little in the almost valueless letters that interest the literature-lover and give him concern about the literature-maker. There is one short page[14] which is worth the remainder of the book. The development of inborn characteristics goes on, despite the grafted soul, almost as fatalistically as Hearn would have wished, and in this instance in accordance with his theory of the unalterability of character. But this period is of surpassing interest solely because of the beautiful books and articles written. To analyze them is both impossible and undesirable. They are for our enjoyment, and after us generations will be delighted by them.

[ [14] Life and Letters, Vol. II, pp. 337 and 338.

Hearn's views and practices as regards love and the feminine are not of sympathetic interest to those who think that monogamy is good and advisable. He hopes his son will not follow in his father's footsteps as regards every damozel in his path, and in this respect become the "disgraceful person he [the father] used to be." He "half suspects" the Oriental husband is right in loving his wife least of all others related to or dependent upon him, and quotes approvingly unquotable things about the laws of (sexual) nature, managing, more suo, to make beautiful the pursuit of beauty "in vain." Than the other, the woman-beauty of soul is the lesser. "It doesn't make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife. The less intellectual the more lovable,—for intellectual converse a man can't have with women." When contemplating legal marriage with "his wife" in 1892, he calculates shrewdly the advantages of the plan. He arrived in Japan in 1890 and in less than two years "my little wife and I have saved nearly 2,000 Japanese dollars between us." When he has made her independent he will quit teaching, and "wander about awhile and write 'sketches' at $10.00 per page." In 1893 he found difficulties in registering the birth of his son. Hearn was still a British subject. If the boy should be a Japanese citizen, the registry must be in the mother's name; if in the father's name, he would become a foreigner. To become a Japanese citizen would mean for Hearn a great reduction in his salary as a teacher under Government pay. "Why was I so foolish as to have a son?" "Really I don't know." In 1895 he "cuts the puzzle" by becoming a Japanese citizen, "losing all chance of Government employment at a living salary." Immediately Hearn "hopes to see a United Orient yet bound into one strong alliance against our cruel Western Civilization," "against what is called Society and what is called Civilization."

For those who boasted of being his friends, it seems an astonishing thing that they should make Hearn portray his vices, his moral nakedness, so publicly. Of course he did not dream of the exposé. It is to his merit, however, that he would place the truth boldly and baldly before his friends. He confesses that the scandalous parts of a book are what he likes best, that he is "a Fraud," "a vile Latin," etc.,—"Vive le monde antique!" He is "not respectable." "Carpets—pianos—windows—curtains—brass bands—churches! how I hate them!! Would I had been born savage; the curse of civilized cities is upon me." He admits that he "cannot understand the moral side, of course," and urges that "the most serious necessity of life is not to take the moral side of it seriously. We must play with it, as with an hetaira." It is needless to add that in this composition and resolve lay Hearn's weakness, his tragedy, and his missing of "greatness." A man so willed must finally see that it is the source of pitiful instabilities and waywardness. "I have been at heart everything by turns." He learns the old trick of blaming "Fate" and "the other fellow;" he is hard-pushed, ignored, starved, morally humiliated:—"the less a man has to do with his fellow-men the better;" "it becomes plain why men cannot be good to one another;" character may not be bettered or changed; "no line exists between life and not-life;" "likes and dislikes never depart;" if Spanish, Italian, or French (instead of English, German, or American) he "can be at home with a villain," etc. Finally there comes that burst of frankness:—"I have more smallness in me than you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for twenty or twenty-five years, he must have acquired something of the disposition peculiar to house-rodents,—mustn't he?" Then increase the complaints of "treachery," the wish for "justice," the desire to go away, somewhere, anywhere; and the limit of the amazing is reached in praising The Conservator and The Whim for bravery and goodness, and in hating Virchow thoroughly. Was Virchow so loathsome because this great scientist found an impassable demarcation between life and the not-life?—"all cells are derived from cells." Is it surprising that his old imagined enemies, the Jesuits, are believed to be hidden in every place, lurking to thwart every ambition or success, even to kill him?[15]

[ [15] Those who care may see how this suspicion obfuscates his mind in an article against some of Hearn's statements, by Henry Thurston, in The Messenger, January 1906.

No man is wholly bad who loves children, none wholly good who does not love them. In a nation of child-lovers, as Hearn's Japanese writings bear witness, he began to catch glimpses of truth hitherto unrecognized. Concerning his eldest son (a fourth child was expected in 1903) Hearn wrote: "No man can possibly know what life means until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole Universe changes,—and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before." Naturally he was drawn to the rich child-lore and fairy tales of Japan. With great difficulty I have secured copies of a number of fairy stories edited by him and published in Japan by T. Hasegawa, Tōkyō, in a style beautiful and dainty beyond superlatives. As mine are probably the only ones in our country, I have ventured to copy herewith two of the tales:—

THE OLD WOMAN WHO LOST HER DUMPLING

Long, long ago, there was a funny old woman, who liked to laugh and to make dumplings of rice-flour.

One day, while she was preparing some dumplings for dinner, she let one fall; and it rolled into a hole in the earthen floor of her little kitchen and disappeared. The old woman tried to reach it by putting her hand down the hole, and all at once the earth gave way, and the old woman fell in.

She fell quite a distance, but was not a bit hurt; and when she got up on her feet again, she saw that she was standing on a road, just like the road before her house. It was quite light down there; and she could see plenty of rice-fields, but no one in them. How all this happened, I cannot tell you. But it seems that the old woman had fallen into another country.

The road she had fallen upon sloped very much; so, after having looked for her dumpling in vain, she thought it must have rolled farther away down the slope. She ran down the road to look, crying:

"My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?"

After a little while she saw a stone Jizo standing by the roadside, and she said:

"O Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"

Jizo answered:

"Yes, I saw your dumpling rolling by me down the road. But you had better not go any farther, because there is a wicked Oni living down there, who eats people."

But the old woman only laughed, and ran on farther down the road, crying: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And she came to another statue of Jizo, and asked it:

"O kind Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"

And Jizo said:

"Yes, I saw your dumpling go by a little while ago. But you must not run any farther, because there is a wicked Oni down there, who eats people."

But she only laughed, and ran on, still crying out: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And she came to a third Jizo, and asked it:

"O dear Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?"

But Jizo said:

"Don't talk about your dumpling now. Here is the Oni coming. Squat down here behind my sleeve, and don't make any noise."

Presently the Oni came very close, and stopped and bowed to Jizo, and said:

"Good-day, Jizo San!"

Jizo said good-day, too, very politely.

Then the Oni suddenly snuffed the air two or three times in a suspicious way, and cried out: "Jizo San, Jizo San! I smell a smell of mankind somewhere—don't you?"

"Oh!" said Jizo, "perhaps you are mistaken."

"No, no!" said the Oni, after snuffing the air again, "I smell a smell of mankind."

Then the old woman could not help laughing, "Te-he-he!"—and the Oni immediately reached down his big hairy hand behind Jizo's sleeve, and pulled her out,—still laughing, "Te-he-he!"

"Ah! ha!" cried the Oni.

Then Jizo said:

"What are you going to do with that good old woman? You must not hurt her."

"I won't," said the Oni. "But I will take her home with me to cook for us."

"Very well," said Jizo; "but you must really be kind to her. If you are not I shall be very angry."

"I won't hurt her at all," promised the Oni; "and she will only have to do a little work for us every day. Good-bye, Jizo San."

Then the Oni took the old woman far down the road, till they came to a wide deep river, where there was a boat, and took her across the river to his house. It was a very large house. He led her at once into the kitchen, and told her to cook some dinner for himself and the other Oni who lived with him. And he gave her a small wooden rice-paddle, and said:

"You must always put only one grain of rice into the pot, and when you stir that one grain of rice in the water with this paddle, the grain will multiply until the pot is full."

So the old woman put just one rice-grain into the pot, as the Oni told her, and began to stir it with the paddle; and, as she stirred, the one grain became two,—then four,—then eight,—then sixteen,—thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on. Every time she moved the paddle the rice increased in quantity; and in a few minutes the great pot was full.

After that, the funny old woman stayed a long time in the house of the Oni, and every day cooked food for him and for all his friends. The Oni never hurt or frightened her, and her work was made quite easy by the magic paddle—although she had to cook a very, very great quantity of rice, because an Oni eats much more than any human being eats.

But she felt lonely, and always wished very much to go back to her own little house, and make her dumplings. And one day, when the Oni were all out somewhere, she thought she would try to run away.

She first took the magic paddle, and slipped it under her girdle; and then she went down to the river. No one saw her; and the boat was there. She got into it, and pushed off; and as she could row very well, she was soon far away from the shore.

But the river was very wide; and she had not rowed more than one-fourth of the way across, when the Oni, all of them, came back to the house.

They found that their cook was gone, and the magic paddle too. They ran down to the river at once, and saw the old woman rowing away very fast.

Perhaps they could not swim: at all events they had no boat; and they thought the only way they could catch the funny old woman would be to drink up all the water of the river before she got to the other bank. So they knelt down, and began to drink so fast that before the old woman was half way over, the water had become quite low.

But the old woman kept on rowing until the water had got so shallow that the Oni stopped drinking, and began to wade across. Then she dropped her oar, took the magic paddle from her girdle, and shook it at the Oni, and made such funny faces that the Oni all burst out laughing.

But the moment they laughed, they could not help throwing up all the water they had drunk, and so the river became full again. The Oni could not cross; and the funny old woman got safely over to the other side, and ran away up the road as fast as she could.

She never stopped running until she found herself at home again. After that she was very happy; for she could make dumplings whenever she pleased. Besides, she had the magic paddle to make rice for her. She sold her dumplings to her neighbours and passengers, and in quite a short time she became rich.

THE BOY WHO DREW CATS

A long, long time ago, in a small country-village in Japan, there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good people. They had a number of children, and found it very hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little girls learned to help their mother almost as soon as they could walk.

But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit for hard work. He was very clever,—cleverer than all his brothers and sisters; but he was quite weak and small, and people said he could never grow very big. So his parents thought it would be better for him to become a priest than to become a farmer. They took him with them to the village-temple one day, and asked the good old priest who lived there, if he would have their little boy for his acolyte, and teach him all that a priest ought to know.

The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard questions. So clever were the answers that the priest agreed to take the little fellow into the temple as an acolyte, and to educate him for the priesthood.

The boy learned quickly what the old priest taught him, and was very obedient in most things. But he had one fault. He liked to draw cats during study-hours, and to draw cats even when cats ought not to have been drawn at all.

Whenever he found himself alone, he drew cats. He drew them on the margins of the priest's books, and on all the screens of the temple, and on the walls, and on the pillars. Several times the priest told him this was not right; but he did not stop drawing cats. He drew them because he could not really help it. He had what is called "the genius of an artist," and just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an acolyte;—a good acolyte should study books.

One day after he had drawn some very clever pictures of cats upon a paper screen, the old priest said to him severely: "My boy, you must go away from this temple at once. You will never make a good priest, but perhaps you will become a great artist. Now let me give you a last piece of advice, and be sure you never forget it: 'Avoid large places at night;—keep to small.'"

The boy did not know what the priest meant by saying, "Avoid large places,—keep to small." He thought and thought, while he was tying up his little bundle of clothes to go away; but he could not understand those words, and he was afraid to speak to the priest any more, except to say good-bye.

He left the temple very sorrowfully, and began to wonder what he should do. If he went straight home, he felt sure his father would punish him for having been disobedient to the priest: so he was afraid to go home. All at once he remembered that at the next village, twelve miles away, there was a very big temple. He had heard there were several priests at that temple; and he made up his mind to go to them and ask them to take him for their acolyte.

Now that big temple was closed up, but the boy did not know this fact. The reason it had been closed up was that a goblin had frightened the priests away, and had taken possession of the place. Some brave warriors had afterwards gone to the temple at night to kill the goblin; but they had never been seen alive again. Nobody had ever told these things to the boy; so he walked all the way to the village, hoping to be kindly treated by the priests.

When he got to the village, it was already dark, and all the people were in bed; but he saw the big temple on a hill at the other end of the principal street, and he saw there was a light in the temple. People who tell the story say the goblin used to make that light, in order to tempt lonely travellers to ask for shelter. The boy went at once to the temple, and knocked. There was no sound inside. He knocked and knocked again; but still nobody came. At last he pushed gently at the door, and was quite glad to find that it had not been fastened. So he went in, and saw a lamp burning,—but no priest.

He thought some priest would be sure to come very soon, and he sat down and waited. Then he noticed that everything in the temple was grey with dust, and thickly spun over with cobwebs. So he thought to himself that the priests would certainly like to have an acolyte, to keep the place clean. He wondered why they had allowed everything to get so dusty. What most pleased him, however, were some big white screens, good to paint cats upon. Though he was tired, he looked at once for a writing-box, and found one, ground some ink, and began to paint cats.

He painted a great many cats upon the screens; and then he began to feel very, very sleepy. He was just on the point of lying down to sleep beside one of the screens, when he suddenly remembered the words: "Avoid large places;—keep to small."

The temple was very large; he was all alone; and as he thought of these words—though he could not quite understand them—he began to feel for the first time a little afraid; and he resolved to look for a small place in which to sleep. He found a little cabinet, with a sliding door, and went into it, and shut himself up. Then he lay down and fell fast asleep.

Very late in the night he was awakened by a most terrible noise,—a noise of fighting and screaming. It was so dreadful that he was afraid even to look through a chink of the little cabinet: he lay very still, holding his breath for fright.

The light that had been in the temple went out; but the awful sounds continued, and became more awful, and all the temple shook. After a long time silence came; but the boy was still afraid to move. He did not move until the light of the morning sun shone into the cabinet through the chinks of the little door.

Then he got out of his hiding-place very cautiously, and looked about. The first thing he saw, lying dead in the middle of it, an enormous monster rat,—a goblin-rat,—bigger than a cow!

But who or what could have killed it? There was no man or other creature to be seen. Suddenly the boy observed that the mouths of all the cats he had drawn the night before, were red and wet with blood. Then he knew that the goblin had been killed by the cats which he had drawn. And then, also, for the first time, he understood why the wise old priest had said to him: "Avoid large places at night;—keep to small."

Afterwards that boy became a very famous artist. Some of the cats which he drew are still shown to travellers in Japan.

At once upon reaching Japan (it is plain Hearn never forgave me for compelling him to go) begin the complaints of the downright hard work of writing, consequent upon the loss of ideals. He breaks with publishers—an old-time story; he is losing his inspiration, and his only hope is that it will return to him again; in any Latin country he could at once, he thinks, get back the much coveted "thrill," or frisson. He would at last even relish the hated United States. From the beginning he tires of the Japanese character, and grows more and more tired the longer he stays; it has no depth, this thin soul-stream; it is incapable of long-sustained effort, prolonged study; he cannot much longer endure Japanese officialism; and the official "is something a good deal lower than a savage and meaner than the straight-out Western rough." He would wish never to write a line again about any Japanese subjects. Things finally came to such a pass that the only successful stimulus to work was that some one should do or say something horribly mean to him, and the force of the hurt could be measured in the months or years of resultant labour. As none ever did a mean thing to him, one may suspect that the psychology of his sudden enmities towards others was that he must perforce imagine that he had been "horribly" treated.

The old Wanderlust, never wholly absent, returns strongly upon him; in less than a year he dreams of leaving Japan and his wife, and of "wandering about awhile;" he projects "a syndicate" whereby he may go to Java (rather than Manila, where the Jesuits were), or, "a French colony,—Tonkin, Noumea, or Pondicherry." A tropical trip is planned for six months of every year. But the "butterfly-lives" dependent upon him prevent, of course. He always spoke of returning often. At the last there is a savage growl that after thirteen years of work for Japan, in which he had sacrificed everything for her, he was "driven out of the service and practically banished from the country."

Hearn's nostalgia for the nowhere or the anywhere was only conquered by death. In 1898 the logic of his life, of his misfortune, and character, begins to grow plainer, and he "fears being blinded or maimed so as to prove of no further use." It seems that if he had been able to do what he tried so often, and longed so fervently to do, he would have run away into the known or unknown, leaving children, wife, and all the ties that bound him to any orderly life. His vision had become almost useless; he had lost his lectureship; more and more it grew impossible to coax or force out of his mind such beautiful things as in younger days; the Furies of his atheism, pessimism, and lovelessness were close on his track; the hope of lectureships in the United States had failed,—nothing was left, nothing except one thing, which, chosen or not, came at the age of fifty-four.

Lessing has said that "Raphael would have been the great painter he was even if he had been born without arms," and Burke has told of a poet "blind from birth who nevertheless could describe visible objects with a spirit and justness excelled by few men blessed with sight." What irony of Fate it is that one almost blind should teach us non-users of our eyes the wonder and glory of colour; that the irreligious one should quicken our faith in the immaterial and unseen; that a sensualist should strengthen our trust in the supersensual; that one whose body and life were unbeautiful should sing such exquisite songs of silent beauty that our straining ears can hardly catch the subtle and unearthly harmonies! For Hearn is another of many splendid illustrations of the old truth that a man's spirit may be more philosophic than his philosophy, more scientific than his science, more religious than his creed, more divine than his divinity.

CHAPTER VIII.—AS A POET

THAT Hearn was a true poet none will deny, but it was one of the frequent seeming illogicalities of his character that he had no love of metric or rhymed poetry. I doubt if there is a single volume of such poetry in his library, and I never heard him repeat a line or stanza, and never knew him to read a page of what is called poetry. I suspect the simple reason was that his necessities compelled him rigidly to exclude everything from his world of thought which did not offer materials for the remunerating public. He had to make a living, and whence tomorrow's income should come was always a vital concern. Poetry of the metric and rhymed sort does not make bread and butter; hence there was no time to consider even the possibility of "cultivating the muses on a little oatmeal."

Of poetry he once wrote:—"The mere ideas and melody of a poem seem to me of small moment unless the complex laws of versification be strictly obeyed." The dictum, considering its source, is exquisitely ludicrous; for Hearn poetry could not be coined into dollars, even if he had had the mind and heart to learn anything of "the complex laws of versification." Elsewhere he excused his manifest utter ignorance of poetry and want of poetic appreciation by saying that there is so little really good poetry that it is easy to choose. He confessed his detestation of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, preferring Dobson, Watson, and Lang. "Of Wordsworth—well, I should smile!" "Refined poetry" he held of little or no value, but he found the "vulgar" songs of coolies, fishermen, etc., very true and beautiful poetry. He vainly tried to translate some of Gautier's poems. He attempted original verse-making but a few times, and from my scrap-book I reproduce one of the results, kindly furnished me by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, to whom it was given by Mr. Tunison. Perhaps it was printed in Forest and Stream.

A CREOLE BOAT SONG

Hot shines the sun o'er the quivering land,
No wind comes up from the sea,
Silent and stark the pine woods stand,
And the mock-bird sleeps in the Mayhaw tree,
Where, overhung with brier and vine,
The placid waters slip and shine
And dimple to thy lover's view—
La belle rivière de Calcasieu.

Under the bending cypress trees,
Bedecked with pendulous cool grey moss
That woos in vain the recreant breeze
And silently mourns its loss.
With drowsy eye, in my little boat
I dreamily lie, and lazily float
Lulled by the thrush's soft Te-rue—
On La belle rivière de Calcasieu.

A heron stands, like a ghost in grey,
Knee-deep 'mongst the bending water lilies,
And yellow butterflies lightly play
'Midst the blooms of fragrant amaryllis;
The swift kingfisher winds his reel,
Saying his grace for his noonday meal,
And a hawk soars up to the welkin blue
O'er La belle rivière de Calcasieu.

Across the point, where the ferry plies,
I hear the click of the boatman's oar,
And his Creole song, with its quavering rise
Re-echoes soft from shore to shore;
And this is the rhyme that he idly sings
As his boat at anchor lazily swings,
For the day is hot, and passers few
On La belle rivière de Calcasieu.

"I ain't got time for make merry, me
I ain't got time for make merry;
My lill' gall waitin' at de River of Death
To meet her ole dad at de ferry.
She gwine be dere wid de smile on her face,
Like the night she died, when all de place
Was lit by the moonbeams shiverin' troo
La belle rivière de Calcasieu.

"O sing dat song! O sing dat song!
I ain't got time for make merry!
De angel come 'fore berry long,
And carr' me o'er de ferry!
He come wid de whirlwind in de night—
He come wid de streak of de morning light—
He find me ready—yass, dass true—
By La belle rivière de Calcasieu.

"Den who got time for make merry, eh?
Den who got time for make merry?
De fire burn up de light 'ood tree,
De bird eat up de berry.
Long time ago I make Voudoo,
An' I dance Calinda strong and true,
But de Lord he pierce me troo and troo
On La belle rivière de Calcasieu."

In the Watkin letters, Hearn transcribes a poem of six stanzas written by himself for the decoration of the soldiers' graves at Chalmette Cemetery in 1878.

Far more successful, for obvious reasons, was an attempt at echoing a bit of Eastern fancy. A strange, gruesome, Oriental being had caught his eye at New Orleans, who translated for him some characteristic Eastern verses. Hearn thus rendered them in English:[16]

[ [16] From Hearn's manuscript copy through the kindness again of Mr. Tunison and Mr. Hill.

THE RUSE

From Amaron Satacum

Late at night the lover returns unlooked-for,
Full of longing, after that cruel absence;—
Finds his darling by her women surrounded;
Enters among them:—

Only sees his beautiful one, his idol,
Speaks no word, but watches her face in silence,
Looks with eyes of thirst and with lips of fever
Burning for kisses.

Late it is; and, nevertheless, the women,
Still remaining, weary his ears with laughter,
Prattling folly, tantalizing his longing—
Teasing his patience.

Love weaves ruse in answer to gaze beseeching;—
Shrill she screams: "O heaven!—What insect stings so!"
And with sudden waft of her robe outshaken,
Blows the vile light out.

I find the following verses in his scrap-book of the New Orleans period:[17]

[ [17] Dated July 11, 1885.

THE MUMMY

(After the French of Louis Bouilhet)

Startled,—as by some far faint din
Of azure-lighted worlds, from sleep,
The Mummy, trembling, wakes within
The hypogeum's blackest deep,—

And murmurs low, with slow sad voice:
"Oh! to be dead and still endure!—
Well may the quivering flesh rejoice
That feels the vulture's gripe impure!

"Seeking to enter this night of death,
Each element knocks at my granite door:—
'We are Earth and Fire and Air,—the breath
Of Winds,—the Spirits of sea and shore.

"'Into the azure, out of the gloom,
Rise!—let thine atoms in light disperse!—
Blend with the date-palm's emerald plume!—
Scatter thyself through the universe!

"'We shall bear thee far over waste and wold:
Thou shalt be lulled to joyous sleep
By leaves that whisper in light of gold,
By murmur of fountains cool and deep.

"'Come!—perchance from thy dungeon dark
Infinite Nature may wish to gain
For the godlike Sun another spark,
Another drop for the diamond rain.'

---

"Woe! mine is death eternal! ... and
I feel Them come, as I lie alone,—
The Centuries, heavy as drifted sand
Heaping above my bed of stone!

"O be accursed, ye impious race!—
Caging the creature that seeks to soar;
Preserving agony's weird grimace,
In hideous vanity, evermore!"

---

Aux bruits lointains ouvrant l'oreille,
Jalouse encor du ciel d'azur,
La momie en tremblant s'éveille
Au fond de l'hypogée obscur.

Oh, dit-elle, de sa voix lente,
Etre mort, et durer toujours.
Heureuse la chaire pantelante
Sous l'ongle courbé des vautours.

Pour plonger dans ma nuit profonde
Chaque element frappe en ce lieu.
—Nous sommes L'air! nous sommes l'onde!
Nous sommes la terre et le feu!

Viens avec nous, le steppe aride
Veut son panache d'arbres verts,
Viens sous l'azur du ciel splendide,
T'éparpiller dans l'univers.

Nous t'emporterons par les plaines
Nous te bercerons à la fois
Dans le murmure des fontaines
Et la bruissement des bois.

Viens. La nature universelle
Cherche peut-être en ce tombeau
Pour de soleil une étincelle!
Pour la mer une goutte d'eau!

---

Et dans ma tombe impérissable
Je sens venir avec affroi
Les siècles lourds comme du sable
Qui s'amoncelle autour de moi.

Ah! sois maudite, race impie,
Qui le l'être arrêtant l'essor
Gardes ta laideur assoupie
Dans la vanité de la mort.

In one of Hearn's letters to the Cincinnati Commercial, written soon after his arrival in New Orleans, he writes:

Here is a specimen closely akin to the Creole of the Antilles. It is said to be an old negro love-song, and I think there is a peculiar weird beauty in several of its stanzas. I feel much inclined to doubt whether it was composed by a negro, but the question of its authorship cannot affect its value as a curiosity, and, in any case, its spirit is thoroughly African. Unfortunately, without accented letters it is impossible to convey any idea of the melody, the liquid softness, the languor, of some of the couplets. My translation is a little free in parts.

I

Dipi me vouer toue, Adèle,
Ape danse calinda,
Mo reste pour toue fidèle,
Liberte a moin caba.
Mo pas soussi d'autt negresses,
Mo pas gagnin coeur pour yo;
Yo gagnin beaucoup finesses;
Yo semble serpent Congo.

II

Mo aime toue trop, ma belle,
Mo pas capab resiste;
Coeur a moin tout comme sauterelle,
Li fait ne qu'appe saute.
Mo jamin contre gnoun femme
Qui gagnin belle taille comme toue;
Jie a ton jete la flamme;
Corps a toue enchene moue.

III

To tant comme serpent sonnette
Qui connin charme zozo,
Qui gagnin bouche a li prette
Pour servi comme gnoun tombo.
Mo jamin voue gnoun negresse Qui connin marche comme toue,
Qui gagnin gnoun si belle gesse;
Corps a toue ce gnoun poupe.

IV

Quand mo pas vouer toue, Adèle,
Mo sentt m'ane mourri,
Mo vini com' gnoun chandelle
Qui ape alle fini:
Mo pas vouer rien sur la terre
Qui capab moin fait plaisi;
Mo capab dans la rivière
Jete moin pour pas souffri.

V

Dis moin si to gagnin n'homme;
Mo va fals ouanga pour li;
Mo fais li tourne fantome,
Si to vle moin pour mari.
Mo pas le in jour toue boudeuse;
L'autt femme, pour moin ce fatras;
Mo va rende toue bien heureuse;
Mo va baill' toue bell' madras.

TRANSLATION

I

Since first I beheld you, Adèle,
While dancing the calinda,
I have remained faithful to the thought of you:
My freedom has departed from me.
I care no longer for all other negresses;
I have no heart left for them:
You have such grace and cunning:
You are like the Congo serpent.

II

I love you too much, my beautiful one:
I am not able to help it.
My heart has become just like a grasshopper,
It does nothing but leap. I have never met any woman
Who has so beautiful a form as yours.
Your eyes flash flame;
Your body has enchained me captive.

III

Ah, you are so like the serpent-of-the-rattles
Who knows how to charm the little bird,
And who has a mouth ever ready for it
To serve it for a tomb!
I have never known any negress
Who could walk with such grace as you can,
Or who could make such beautiful gestures:
Your body is a beautiful doll.

IV

When I cannot see you, Adèle,
I feel myself ready to die;
My life becomes like a candle
Which has almost burned itself out.
I cannot, then, find anything in the world,
Which is able to give me pleasure;—
I could well go down to the river
And throw myself in it that I might cease to suffer.

V

Tell me if you have a man;
And I will make an ouanga charm for him;
I will make him turn into a phantom,
If you will only take me for your husband.
I will not go to see you when you are cross;
Other women are mere trash to me;
I will make you very happy,
And I will give you a beautiful Madras handkerchief.

I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called "line of beauty" serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women?—something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination?—something of Lilith and Lamia? The French have a beautiful verb expressive of this idea, serpenter, "to serpent"—to curve in changing undulations like a lithe snake. The French artist speaks of the outlines of a beautiful human body as "serpenting," curving and winding like a serpent. Do you not like the word? I think it is so expressive of flowing lines of elegance—so full of that mystery of grace which puzzled Solomon; "the way of a serpent upon a rock."

The allusion to Voudooism in the last stanza especially interested me, and I questioned the gentleman who furnished me with the song as to the significance of the words: "I will make him turn into a phantom." I had fancied that the term fantome might be interpreted by "ghost," and that the whole line simply constituted a threat to make some one "give up the ghost."

"It is not exactly that," replied my friend; "it is an allusion, I believe, to the withering and wasting power of Voudoo poisons. There are such poisons actually in use among the negro obi-men—poisons which defy analysis, and, mysterious as the poisons of the Borgias, slowly consume the victims like a taper. He wastes away as though being dried up; he becomes almost mummified; he wanes like a shadow; he turns into a phantom in the same sense that a phantom is an unreal mockery of something real."

Thus I found an intelligent Louisianan zealous to confirm an opinion to which I was permitted to give expression in the Commercial nearly three years ago—that a knowledge of secret septic poisons (probably of an animal character), which leave no trace discoverable by the most skilful chemists, is actually possessed by certain beings who are reverenced as sorcerers by the negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States, but more especially of the West Indies, where much of African fetichism has been transplanted.

Ozias Midwinter.

CHAPTER IX.—THE POET OF MYOPIA

THE dependence not only of the literary character and workmanship of a writer, but even his innermost psyche, upon vision, normal or abnormal, is a truth which has been dimly and falteringly felt by several writers. Concerning "Madame Bovary," and his friend Flaubert, Maxime du Camp reflects some glintings of the truth. But these and others, lacking the requisite expert definiteness of knowledge, have failed to catch the satisfying and clear point of view. To illustrate I may quote the paragraph of du Camp:

"The literary procedure of Flaubert threw everybody off the track and even some of the experts. But it was a very simple matter; it was by the accumulation and the superposition of details that he arrived at power. It is the physiologic method, the method of the myopes who look at things one after the other, very exactly, and then describe them successively. The literature of imagination may be divided into two distinct schools, that of the myopes and that of the hyperopes. The myopes see minutely, study every line, finding each detail of importance because everything appears to them in isolation; about them is a sort of cloud in which is detached the object in exaggerated proportions. They have, as it were, a microscope in their eye which enlarges everything. The description of Venice from the Campanile of St. Mark, that of Destitution in 'Captain Fracasse,' by Gautier are the capital results of myopic vision. The hyperopes, on the other hand, look at the ensemble, in which the details are lost, and form a kind of general harmony. The detail loses all significance, except perhaps they seek to bring it into relief as a work of art.... Besides, the myopes seek to portray sensations, while the hyperopes especially aim at analysis of the sentiments. If a hyperopic writer suddenly becomes myopic, his manner of thinking, and consequently of writing, at once is modified. What I call the school of the myopes, Gautier names the school of the rabids. He said to Mérimée: 'Your characters have no muscles,' and Mérimée answered, 'Yours have no draperies.'"

But there is one consequence, common both to Flaubert and to Hearn, a most strange unity of result flowing from a seemingly opposed but really identical cause in the two men. I have elsewhere set forth the reasons for my belief that the secret of Flaubert's life, character, and literary art consisted in an inability to think and write at the same time. He was one of the most healthy and brilliant of men when he did not read or write, but his mind refused to act creatively whenever he wrote or read. From this resulted his epilepsy. Fathered by the fear of this disease, mothered by opium, and reared by unhygiene and eye-strain, came the miserable "St. Anthony" of the second remaking. In the failure of this pitiful work there was naught left except bottomless pessimism, the "cadenced phrase," and all the rest, called "Madame Bovary" and "art for art's sake."

There never was a greater sufferer from eye-strain than Flaubert, whose eyes were strikingly beautiful, and seemingly of extraordinary perfection as optical instruments. From this fact flowed the entire tragedy of the man's life and of his life-work. His friend du Camp says that had it not been for his disease he would have been, not a writer of great talent, but a man of genius. Hearn had the most defective eyesight, he was indeed nearly blind; but physically he suffered little from this cause,—and yet his choice of subjects and methods of literary workmanship, and every line he wrote, were dictated and ruled by his defect of vision. Opium, with the impossibility of writing and creating at the same time, dominated Flaubert's work and working, and the similar result was begot by Hearn's enormous monocular myopia.

From Martinique, before I had met him, Hearn wrote me:

I am very near-sighted, have lost one eye, which disfigures me considerably; and my near-sightedness always prevented the gratification of a natural penchant for physical exercise. I am a good swimmer, that is all.

In reply to nearly all the questions about my near-sightedness I might answer, "Yes." I had the best advice in London, and observe all the rules you suggest. Glasses strain the eye too much—part of retina is gone. The other eye was destroyed by a blow at college; or, rather, by inflammation consequent upon the blow. I can tell you more about myself when I see you, but the result will be more curious than pleasing. Myopia is not aggravating.

In "Shadowings," the chapter on "Nightmare-Touch," Hearn describes with his gift of the living word the dreams and hauntings he endured when as a boy he was shut in his room in the dark. It is a pitiful history, and shows how a child may suffer atrociously from the combination of an abnormally exuberant fancy and eye-strain, probably with added ocular disease. The subjective sensations and images were alive and Hearn's innate tendency to the horrible and hideous gave them the most awful of nightmarish realities.

I have already given (facing page 5) a copy of a little photograph of Hearn at about the age of eight, standing by Mrs. Brenane. It will be seen that the right eyeball was at this time about as large and protruding as in later life. This leaves a doubt whether the destruction of the left was due to the blow at college at the age of sixteen. In one of my letters he uses the word "scrofulous" in alluding to himself.

It was not only during the last years of his life, that, as he says, "it was now largely a question of eyes." It was always the most important of all questions; first, physically and financially, because all hung upon his ability to write many hours a day. How his little of visual power was preserved under the work done is a marvel of physiology. So unconscious was Hearn of the influence of eye-strain in ruining the health of others (he himself had no eye-strain in the ordinary meaning of the term) that he wonders why the hard students about him were inexplainably dying, going mad, getting sick, and giving up their studies. This is hardly to be considered a fault of Hearn when educators and physicians and oculists the world over, never suspect the reason.

Moved by sympathy, and perhaps by the vaguest feeling that to Hearn's poor vision were due, in part at least, both his personal and literary characteristics, I early besought him to make use of scientific optical helps in order to see the world better, and to carry on his writing with greater ease, and with less danger to the little vision left him. He had but one eye, which was evidently enormously nearsighted. The other had been lost in youth. I found that he had about 25 diopters of myopia, to use the jargon of the oculist, and that consequently he knew little about the appearance of objects even a few feet away. In writing he was compelled to place the paper or pen-point about three inches from his eye. With the proper lens it was possible to give him vision of distant objects about one-fourth as clear as that of normal eyes. For a minute my disappointment was equal to my surprise when I found that he did not wish to see with even this wretched indistinctness, and that he would not think of using spectacles or eyeglasses. Later I found the reason for his action. He sometimes carried a little lens or monocle in his pocket, which somewhat bettered his vision, but in the several months he spent with me I saw him use it only once or twice, and then merely for an instant. I am almost sure that the reason for this preference for a world almost unseen, or seen only in colours, while form and outline were almost unknown, was never conscious with Hearn, although his mind was alert in detecting such psychologic solutions in others. In studying his writings, this reason finally has become clear to me.

When one chooses an artistic calling, Fate usually, and to the artist unconsciously, dictates the kind of art-work and the method of carrying it to realization. The blind do not choose to be painters, but musicians; the deaf do not think of music, though nothing prevents them from being good painters. The dumb would hardly become orators or singers, but they might easily be sculptors, or painters, or designers. It is as evident that the poet is largely a visualizer, if one may so designate this psychic function, and without sight of the world of reality and beauty, poetry will inevitably lack the charm of the real and the lovely. Every great writer, in truth, shows more or less clearly that the spring and secret of his imagination lie preponderantly in the exceptional endowment, training, or sensitiveness of one of the principal senses of sight, hearing, or touch. A thousand quotations might be made from each of a dozen great writers to prove the thesis. The man born blind, however, cannot become a poet, because true poetry must be conditioned upon things seen—"simple, sensuous, and passionate" demands the great critic; but interwoven and underrunning the simplicity, the passion, and the sense, is and must be the world as mirrored by the eye. All thinking, all intellectual activity, is by no means of the image and the picture; all words are the product of the imagining, and the very letters of the alphabet are conventionalized pictures.

Physiologically, or normally, the perfection of the artist and of his workmanship thus depends upon the all-round perfection of his senses, the fulness of the materials and of his experience which these work on and in, and the logical and æsthetic rightness of systematization. Conversely, a new pathology of genius is coming into view which shows the morbidizing of art and literature through disease, chiefly of the sense-organs of the artist and literary workman, but also by unnatural living, selfishness, sin, and the rest. As Hearn was probably the most myopic literary man that has existed, his own thoughts upon The Artistic Value of Myopia are of peculiar interest. In 1887 one of his editorials in the Times-Democrat runs as follows:—

Probably more than one reader, on coming to page 15 of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's delightful book, "Landscape," was startled by the author's irrefutable statement that "the possession of very good eyesight may be a hindrance to those feelings of sublimity that exalt the poetic imagination." The fact is, that the impressiveness of natural scenery depends a great deal upon the apparent predominance of mass over detail, to borrow Mr. Hamerton's own words; the more visible the details of a large object,—a mountain, a tower, a forest wall, the less grand and impressive that object. The more apparently uniform the mass, the larger it seems to loom; the vaguer a shadow-space, the deeper it appears. An impression of weirdness,—such as that obtainable in a Louisiana or Florida swamp-forest, or, much more, in those primeval and impenetrable forest-deeps described so powerfully by Humbolt,—is stronger in proportion to the spectator's indifference to lesser detail. The real effect of the scene must be a general one to be understood. In painting, the artist does not attempt miscroscopic minutiæ in treating forest-forms; he simply attempts to render the effect of the masses, with their characteristic generalities of shadow and colour. It is for this reason the photograph can never supplant the painting—not even when the art of photographing natural colours shall have been discovered. Mr. Hamerton cites the example of a mountain, which always seems more imposing when wreathed in mists or half veiled by clouds, than when cutting sharply against the horizon with a strong light upon it. Half the secret of Doré's power as an illustrator was his exaggerated perception of this fact,—his comprehension of the artistic witchcraft of suggestion. And since the perception of details depends vastly upon the quality of eyesight, a landscape necessarily suggests less to the keen-sighted man than to the myope. The keener the view, the less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of mysterious attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like the eye of the hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of each leaf. Far-seeing persons can, to a certain degree, comprehend this by recalling the impressions given in twilight by certain unfamiliar, or by even familiar objects,—such as furniture and clothing in a half-lighted room. The suggestiveness of form vanishes immediately upon the making of a strong light. Again, attractive objects viewed vaguely through a morning or evening haze, or at a great distance, often totally lose artistic character when a telescope is directed upon them.

In the February number of Harper's Magazine we find a very clever and amusing poem by the scholarly Andrew Lang upon this very theme. The writer, after describing the christening-gifts of various kindly fairies, tells us that the wicked one—

—Said: "I shall be avenged on you.
My child, you shall grow up nearsighted!"
With magic juices did she lave
Mine eyes, and wrought her wicked pleasure.
Well, of all the gifts the Fairies gave,
Her's is the present that I treasure!

The bore, whom others fear and flee,
I do not fear, I do not flee him;
I pass him calm as calm can be;
I do not cut—I do not see him!
And with my feeble eyes and dim,
Where you see patchy fields and fences,
For me the mists of Turner swim—
My "azure distance" soon commences!
Nay, as I blink about the streets
Of this befogged and miry city,
Why, almost every girl one meets
Seems preternaturally pretty!
"Try spectacles," one's friends intone;
"You'll see the world correctly through them."
But I have visions of my own
And not for worlds would I undo them!

This is quite witty and quite consoling to myopes, even as a cynical development of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's artistic philosophy. Still, it does not follow that the myope necessarily possesses the poetic faculty or feeling;—neither does it imply that the presbyope necessarily lacks it. If among French writers, for example, Gautier was notably nearsighted, Victor Hugo had an eye as keen as a bird's. It is true that a knowledge of the effect of shortsightedness on the imagination may be of benefit to a nearsighted man, who, possessing artistic qualities, can learn to take all possible advantage of his myopia,—to utilize his physical disability to a good purpose; but the longsighted artist need not be at a loss to find equally powerful sources of inspiration—he can seek them in morning mists, evening fogs, or those wonderful hazes of summer afternoons, when the land sends up all its vapours to the sun, like a smoke of gold. Beaudelaire, in his Curiosités Esthétiques, made an attempt to prove that the greatest schools of painting were evolved among hazy surroundings—Dutch fogs, Venetian mists, and the vapours of Italian marsh-lands.

The evolutionary tendency would seem to indicate for future man a keener vision than he at present possesses; and a finer perception of colour—for while there may be certain small emotional advantages connected with myopia, it is a serious hindrance in practical life. What effect keener sight will have on the artistic powers of the future man, can only be imagined—but an increasing tendency to realism in art is certainly perceptible; and perhaps an interesting chapter could be written upon the possible results to art of perfected optical instruments. The subject also suggests another idea,—that the total inability of a certain class of highly educated persons to feel interest in a certain kind of art production may be partly accounted for by the possession of such keen visual perception as necessarily suppresses the sensation of breadth of effect, either in landscape or verbal description.

Thus, according to Flaubert, the myope looks at things one after another and describes details, while Hearn says the exact opposite. Both are wrong. The oculist will feel constrained to differ somewhat from Hearn in the foregoing article.

In May 1887 he reviews editorially an article of my own which I had sent him during the preceding year. Again, because there has never been a literary artist with a colour-sense so amazingly developed as that of Hearn, I venture to copy his commendation of my views:

COLOURS AND EMOTIONS

(May 8, 1887)

The evolutionary history of the Colour-Sense, very prettily treated of by Grant Allen and others, both in regard to the relation between fertilization of flowers by insects, and in regard to the æsthetic pleasure of man in contemplating certain colours, has also been considered in a very thorough way by American thinkers. Perhaps the most entertaining and instructive paper yet published on the subject was one in the American Journal of Ophthalmology last September. It has just been reprinted in pamphlet form, under the title of "The Human Colour-Sense as the Organic Response to Natural Stimuli;" and contains a remarkable amplification of these theories, rather suggested than laid down by the author of "Physiological Æsthetics." Of course, the reader whom the subject can interest, comprehends that outside of the mind no such thing as colour exists; and that the phenomena of colours, like those of sound, are simply the results of exterior impressions upon nerve apparatus specially sensitive to vibrations—in the one case of ether, in the other of air. Everybody, moreover,—even those totally ignorant of the physiology of the eye—know that certain colours are called primary or elementary. But it has probably occurred to few to ask why,—except in regard to mixing of paints in a drawing-school.

The theories of Gladstone and Magnus that the men of the Homeric era were colour-blind, because of the absence from the Homeric poems of certain words expressive of certain colours, have been disproved by more thorough modern research. The primitive man's sense of colour, or the sensitiveness of his retina to ether vibrations, may not have been as fine as that of the Roman mosaic-worker who could select his materials of 30,000 different tints, nor as that of Gobelin weavers, who can recognize 28,000 different shades of wool. But the evidence goes to show that the sense of colour is old as the gnawing of hunger or the pangs of fear,—old as the experience that taught living creatures to discern food and to flee from danger. There is, however, reason to suppose, from certain developmental phenomena observed in the eyes of children and newly-born animals, that the present condition of the colour-sense has been gradually reached—not so much in any particular species, as in all species possessing it,—just as vision itself must have been gradually acquired. Also showy colours must have been perceived before tints could be discerned; and even now we know through the spectroscope, that the human eye is not yet developed to the fullest possible perceptions of colour. Now the first colours recognized by the first eyes must have presumably been just those we call primary,—Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. Yellow, the colour of gold, is also the colour of our sun; the brightest daylight has a more or less faint tinge even at noon, according to the state of the atmosphere;—and this tinge deepens at sunrise and sunset. Red is the colour of blood,—a colour allied necessarily from time immemorial with violent mental impressions, whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world. Blue,—the blue of the far away sky,—has necessarily always been for man the colour mysterious and holy,—always associated with those high phenomena of heaven which first inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. These colours were probably first known to intelligent life; and their impressions are to-day the strongest. So violent, indeed, have they become to our refined civilized sense, that in apparel or decoration three of them, at least, are condemned when offered pure. Even the armies of the world are abandoning red uniforms;—no refined people wear flaming crimsons or scarlets or yellows;—nobody would paint a house or decorate a wall with a solid sheet of strong primary colour. Blue is still the least violent, the most agreeable to the artistic sense; and in subdued form it holds a place, in costume and in art, refused to less spiritual colours.

It might consequently be expected there should exist some correlation between the primary colours and the stronger emotional states of man. And such, indeed, proves to be the case. Emotionally the colours come in the order of Red, Yellow, Green, Blue. Red still appeals to the idea of Passion,—for which very reason its artistic use is being more and more restrained. Very curious are the researches made by Grant Allen showing the fact of the sensual use of the red. In Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads "(the same suppressed work republished in this country under its first title, "Laus Veneris"), the red epithets appear 159 times, while gold, green and blue words occur respectively 143, 86 and 25 times. In Tennyson's beautiful poem, "The Princess," the red words occur only 20 times, the gold 28, the green 5, the blue once. With all his exquisite sense of colour, Tennyson is sparing of adjectives;—there is no false skin to his work; it is solid muscle and bone.

Next to Red, the most emotional colour is Yellow—the colour of life, and of what men seem to prize next to life,—Gold. We fancy we can live without green sometimes; it comes third; but it is the hue associated with all the labours of man on the earth, since he began to labour. It is the colour of Industry. Blue has always been, since man commenced to think, and always will be, until he shall have ceased to think,—associated with his spiritual sense,—his idea of many gods or of One,—his hopes of a second life, his faith, his good purposes, his perception of duty. Still, all who pray, turn up their faces toward the eternal azure. And with the modern expansion of the Idea of God, as with the modern expansion of the Idea of the Universe, the violet gulf of space ever seems more mystical,—its pure colour more and more divine, and appeals to us as the colour of the Unknowable,—the colour of the Holy of Holies.

That Hearn wrote not from his own experience, out of his own heart, and with its blood, was due to the fact that life had denied him the needed experience; the personal materials, those that would interest the imaginative or imagining reader, did not exist. He must borrow, at first literally, which for him meant translation or retelling. The kind of things chosen was also dictated by the tragedy and pathos of his entire past life. But as if this pitiful tangling of the strands of Destiny were not enough, Fate added a knot of still more controlling misfortune. His adult life was passed without the poet's most necessary help of good vision. Indeed he had such extremely poor vision that one might say it was only the merest fraction of the normal. A most hazy blur of colours was all he perceived of objects beyond a foot or two away. There was left for him the memory of a world of forms as seen in his childhood; but that fact throws into relief the fact that it was a memory. It needs little psychologic acumen to realize how inaccurate would be our memories of trees, landscapes, mountains, oceans, cities, and the rest, seen only thirty years ago. How unsatisfying, how unreliable, especially for artistic purposes, must such memories be! To be sure, these haunting and dim recollections were, or might have been, helped out a little by pictures and photographs studied at the distance of three inches from the eye. The pathos of this, however, is increased by the fact that Hearn cared nothing for such photographs, etchings, engravings, etc. I never saw him look at one with attention or interest. Paintings, water-colours, etc., were as useless to him as the natural views themselves.

Another way that he might have supplemented his infirmity was by means of his monocle, but he made little use of this poor device, because he instinctively recognized that it aided so meagrely. One cannot be sure how consciously he refused the help, or knew the reasons for his refusal. At best it could give him only a suggestion of the accurate knowledge which our eyes give us of distant objects, and not even his sensitive mind could know that it minimized the objects thus seen, and almost turned them into a caricaturing microscopic smallness, like that produced when we look through the large end of an opera-glass. What would we think of the world if we carried before our eyes an opera-glass thus inverted? Would not a second's such use be as foolish as continuous use? There was an optical and sensible reason for his refusal. With the subtle wisdom of the unconscious he refused to see plainly, because his successful work, his unique function, lay in the requickening of ancient sorrows, and of lost, aimless and errant souls. He supplemented the deficiencies of vision with a vivid imagination, a perfect memory, and a perfection of touch which gave some sense of solidity and content, and by hearing, that echo-like emphasized unreality; but his world was essentially a two-dimensional one. To add the comble to his ocular misfortunes, he had but one eye, and therefore he had no stereoscopic vision, and hence almost no perception of solidity, thickness, or content except such as was gained by the sense of touch, memory, judgment, etc. The little glimpse of stereoscopic qualities was made impossible by the fact of his enormous myopia, and further by the comparative blindness to objects beyond a few inches or a few feet away from the eye. The small ball becomes flat when brought sufficiently near the eye. Practically the world beyond a few feet was not a three-dimensional one; it was coloured it is true, and bewilderingly so, but it was formless and flat, without much thickness or solidity, and almost without perspective.[18] Moreover, Hearn's single eye was divergent, and more of the world to his left side was invisible to him than to other single-eyed persons. Most noteworthy also is another fact,—the slowness of vision by a highly myopic eye. It takes it longer to see what it finally does see than in the case of other eyes. So all the movements of such a myopic person must be slow and careful, for he is in doubt about everything under foot, or even within reach of the hands. Hearn's myopia produced his manners.

[ [18] I have gathered, but must omit, a hundred illuminating quotations from Hearn's writings, illustrating the truth of the formlessness and non-objectivity of his world, and how colour dominated his poorly seen universe.

Intellect, one must repeat, is largely, almost entirely, the product of vision,—especially the æsthetic part of intellect. And intellect, it should not be forgotten, is "desiccated emotion"; which brings us up sharply before the question of the effect upon æsthetic and general feeling, upon the soft swirl and lift and flitting rush of the emotional nature, in a psyche so sensitive and aerial as that of Hearn. In this rare ether one loses the significance of words, and the limitations of logic, but it may not be doubted that in the large, the summarized effect of thirty years of two-dimensional seeing and living, of a flat, formless, coloured world, upon the immeasurably quick, sensitive plate of Hearn's mind, was—well, it was what it was!

And who can describe that mind! Clearly and patently, it was a mind without creative ability, spring, or the desire for it. It was a mind improcreant by inheritance and by education, by necessity and by training, by poverty internal and external. To enable its master to live, it must write, and, as was pitifully evident, if it could not write in obedience to a creative instinct, it must do the next best thing. This residual second was to describe the external world, or at least so much of the externals of all worlds, physical, biological, or social, as romance or common-sense demanded to make the writing vivid, accurate, and bodied. Any good literature, especially the poetic, must be based on reality, must at least incidentally have its running obligato of reality. For the poet, again emphasized, vision is the intermediary, the broad, bright highway to facts. Prosaically, local colour requires the local seer. Barred from this divine roadway to and through the actual universe, the foiled mind of Hearn could choose but one course: to regarment, transform, and colour the world, devised and transmitted by others, and reversing the old ο λογος σαρξ εγενετο rewrite the history of the soul as σαρξ ο λογος εγενετο , for in Hearn's alembic the solidest of flesh was "melted" and escaped in clouds of spirit; it was indeed often so disembodied and freed that one is lost in wonder at the mere vision of the cloudland so eerie, so silent, so void, so invisibly far, and fading ever still farther away. But, chained to the here Hearn could not march on the bright road. He could never even see the road, or its ending. If freed to go, there became here with the intolerable limitation of his vision, the peculiarity of his unvision. The world, the world of the there must be brought to him, and in the bringing it became the here. In the process, distant motion or action became dead, silent, and immobile being; distance was transformed to presence, and an intimacy of presence which at one blow destroyed scene, setting, and illumination. For, except to passionate love, nearness and touch are not poetical or transfiguring, and to Hearn love never could come; at least it never did come. Except in boyhood he never, with any accuracy of expression or life, saw a human face; at the best, he saw faces only in the frozen photographs, and these interested him little.

With creative instinct or ability denied, with the poet's craving for open-eyed knowing, and with the poet's necessity of realizing the world out there, Hearn, baldly stated, was forced to become the poet of myopia. His groping mind was compelled to rest satisfied with the world of distance and reality transported by the magic carpet to the door of his imagination and fancy. There in a flash it was melted to formless spirit, recombined to soul, and given the semblance of a thin reincarnation, fashioned, refashioned, coloured, recoloured. There, lo! that incomparable wonder of art, the haunting, magical essence of reality, the quivering, elusive protean ghost of the tragedy of dead pain, the smile of a lost universe murmuring non dolet while it dies struck by the hand of the beloved murderer.

CHAPTER X.—HEARN'S STYLE

"THE 'lovers of the antique loveliness,'" wrote Hearn, "are proving to me the future possibilities of a long-cherished dream—the English realization of a Latin style, modelled upon foreign masters, and rendered even more forcible by that element of strength which is the characteristic of the northern tongues." "I think that Genius must have greater attributes than mere creative power to be called to the front rank,—the thing created must be beautiful; it does not satisfy if the material be rich. I cannot content myself with ores and rough jewels, etc." "It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction analogous to that warmth of colour and richness of imagery hitherto peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek, I feel rather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon; and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of latter-day English or American romance." "The volume, 'Chinese Ghosts,' is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph some day, poetical prose." "A man's style, when fully developed, is part of his personality. Mine is being shaped to a particular end."

Hearn advised the use of the etymological dictionary in order to secure "that subtle sense of words to which much that startles in poetry and prose is due." But although always remaining an artist in words, he, at his best, came to know that artistic technique in ideas is a more certain method of arousing and holding the readers' interest. He also strongly urges a knowledge of Science as more necessary to the formation of a strong style. In this, however, he never practised what he commended, because he had no mind for Science, nor knowledge of scientific things. He spoke with pride of writing the scientific editorials for his paper, but they were few and may quickly be ignored.

Flaubert was Hearn's literary deity; the technique of the two men was identical, and consisted of infinite pains with data, in phrase-building, sentence-making, and word-choosing. With no writer was the filing of the line ever carried to higher perfection than with both master and pupil; fortunately the younger had to make his living by his pen, and therefore he could not wreck himself upon the impossible task as did Flaubert. For nothing is more certain to ruin style and content, form as well as matter, than to make style and form the first consideration of a writer. Flaubert, the fashion-maker and supreme example of this school, came at last to recognize this truth, and wished that he might buy up and destroy all copies of "Madame Bovary;" and he summed up the unattainableness of the ideal, as well as the resultant abysmal pessimism, when he said that "form is only an error of sense, and substance a fancy of your thought." His ever-repeated "Art has no morality," "The moment a thing is true it is good," "Style is an absolute method of seeing things," "The idea exists only by virtue of its form," etc., led Flaubert and his thousand imitators into the quagmire which Zola, Wilde, Shaw, and decadent journalism generally so admirably illustrate. That Hearn escaped from the bog is due to several interesting reasons, the chief being his poverty, which compelled him to write much, and his audience, which, being Anglo-Saxon (and therefore properly and thoroughly cursed), would not buy the elegant pornography of Flaubert and the gentlemen who succeeded, or did not succeed, in the perfection of the worship and of the works of the master of them all. And then Hearn was himself at least part Anglo-Saxon, so that he shrank from perfection in the method.

There is a pathetic proof of the lesson doubly repeated in the lives of both Flaubert and Hearn. "St. Anthony" was rewritten three times, and each time the failures might be called, great, greater, greatest. There lies before me Hearn's manuscript translation of the third revision of the work, in two large volumes, with a printed pamphlet of directions to the printer, an Introduction, etc.,—a great labour assuredly on Hearn's part. No publisher could be found to give it to the world of English readers![19] Moreover, there was never in his life any personal happiness, romance, poetry, or satisfaction which could serve as the material of Hearn's æsthetic faculty. Almost every hour of that life had been lived in physical or mental anguish, denied desire, crushed yearnings, and unguided waywardness. Born of a Greek mother, and a roving English father, his childhood was passed in an absurd French school where another might have become a dwarfed and potted Chinese tree. Flung upon the alien world of the United States in youth, without self-knowledge, experience, or self-guiding power, he drank for years all the bitter poisons of poverty, banality, and the rest, which may not shatter the moral and mental health of strong and coarse natures. By nature and necessity shy beyond belief, none may imagine the poignant sufferings he endured, and how from it all he writhed at last to manhood and self-consciousness, preserved a weird yet real beauty of soul, a morbid yet genuine artist-power, a child-like and childish, yet most involuted and mysterious heart, a supple and subtle, yet illogical and contentless intellect.

[ [19] Particulars concerning the manuscript translation of "St. Anthony" are given in the Bibliography of Miss Stedman, Hearn's "Argument" of the book being reprinted in full.

The most striking evidence of the pathetic and unmatched endowment and experience is that, while circumstance dictated that he should be a romancer, no facts in his own life could be used as his material. There had been no romance, no love, no happiness, no interesting personal data, upon which he could draw to give his imagination play, vividness, actuality, or even the semblance of reality. So sombre and tragic, moreover, had been his own living that the choice of his themes could only be of unhealthy, almost unnatural, import and colouring. He therefore chose to work over the imaginings of other writers, and perforce of morbid ones.

A glance at his library confirms the opinion. When Hearn left for Japan, he turned over to me several hundred volumes which he had collected and did not wish to take with him. His most-prized books he had had especially rebound in dainty morocco covers, and these, particularly, point to the already established taste, the yearning for the strange, the weird, and the ghost-like, the gathered and pressed exotic flowers of folklore, the banalities and morbidities of writers with unleashed imaginations, the love of antique religions and peoples, the mysteries of mystics, the descriptions of savage life and rites—all mixed with dictionaries, handbooks, systems of philosophy, etc.

Under the conditioning factor of his taste, it is true that his choice, or his flair, was unique and inerrant. He tracked his game with fatal accuracy to its lair. His literary sense was perfect, when he set it in action, and this is his unique merit. There has never been a mind more infallibly sure to find the best in all literatures, the best of the kind he sought, and probably his translations of the stories from the French are as perfect as can be.