The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Volume 1

by Elizabeth Bisland

MY FIRST ROMANCE

There has been sent to me, across the world, a little book stamped, on its yellow cover, with names of Scandinavian publishers,—names sounding of storm and strand and surge. And the sight of those names, worthy of Frost-Giants, evokes the vision of a face,—simply because that face has long been associated, in my imagination, with legends and stories of the North—especially, I think, with the wonderful stories of Björnstjerne Björnson.

It is the face of a Norwegian peasant-girl of nineteen summers,—fair and ruddy and strong. She wears her national costume: her eyes are grey like the sea, and her bright braided hair is tied with a blue ribbon. She is tall; and there is an appearance of strong grace about her, for which I can find no word. Her name I never learned, and never shall be able to learn;—and now it does not matter. By this time she may have grandchildren not a few. But for me she will always be the maiden of nineteen summers,—fair and fresh from the land of the Hrimthursar,—a daughter of gods and Vikings. From the moment of seeing her I wanted to die for her; and I dreamed of Valkyrja and of Vala-maids, of Freyja and of Gerda....

—She is seated, facing me, in an American railroad-car,—a third-class car, full of people whose forms have become indistinguishably dim in memory. She alone remains luminous, vivid: the rest have faded into shadow,—all except a man, sitting beside me, whose dark Jewish face, homely and kindly, is still visible in profile. Through the window on our right she watches the strange new world through which we are passing: there is a trembling beneath us, and a rhythm of thunder, while the train sways like a ship in a storm.

An emigrant-train it is; and she, and I, and all those dim people are rushing westward, ever westward,—through days and nights that seem preternaturally large,—over distances that are monstrous. The light is of a summer day; and shadows slant to the east.

The man beside me says:—

“She must leave us to-morrow;—she goes to Redwing, Minnesota.... You like her very much?—yes, she’s a fine girl. I think you wish that you were also going to Redwing, Minnesota?”

I do not answer. I am angry that he should know what I wish. And it is very rude of him, I think, to let me know that he knows.

Mischievously, he continues:—

“If you like her so much, why don’t you talk to her? Tell me what you would like to say to her; and I’ll interpret for you.... Bah! you must not be afraid of the girls!”

Oh!—the idea of telling him what I should like to say to her!... Yet it is not possible to see him smile, and to remain vexed with him.

Anyhow, I do not feel inclined to talk. For thirty-eight hours I have not eaten anything; and my romantic dreams, nourished with tobacco-smoke only, are frequently interrupted by a sudden inner aching that makes me wonder how long I shall be able to remain without food. Three more days of railroad travel—and no money!... My neighbour yesterday asked me why I did not eat;—how quickly he changed the subject when I told him! Certainly I have no right to complain: there is no reason why he should feed me. And I reflect upon the folly of improvidence.

Then my reflection is interrupted by the apparition of a white hand holding out to me a very, very large slice of brown bread, with an inch-thick cut of yellow cheese thereon; and I look up, hesitating, into the face of the Norwegian girl. Smiling, she says to me, in English, with a pretty childish accent:

“Take it, and eat it.”

I take it, and devour it. Never before nor since did brown bread and cheese seem to me so good. Only after swallowing the very last crumb do I suddenly become aware that, in my surprise and hunger, I forgot to thank her. Impulsively, and at the wrong moment, I try to say some grateful words.

Instantly, and up to the roots of her hair, she flushes crimson: then, bending forward, she puts some question in a clear sharp tone that fills me with fear and shame. I do not understand the question: I understand only that she is angry; and for one cowering moment my instinct divines the power and the depth of Northern anger. My face burns; and her grey eyes, watching it burn, are grey steel; and her smile is the smile of a daughter of men who laugh when they are angry. And I wish myself under the train,—under the earth,—utterly out of sight forever. But my dark neighbour makes some low-voiced protest,—assures her that I had only tried to thank her. Whereat the level brows relax, and she turns away, without a word, to watch the flying landscape; and the splendid flush fades from her cheek as swiftly as it came. But no one speaks: the train rushes into the dusk of five and thirty years ago ... and that is all!

... What can she have imagined that I said?... My swarthy comrade would not tell me. Even now my face burns again at the thought of having caused a moment’s anger to the kind heart that pitied me,—brought a blush to the cheek of the being for whose sake I would so gladly have given my life.... But the shadow, the golden shadow of her, is always with me; and, because of her, even the name of the land from which she came is very, very dear to me.

In Cincinnati Hearn eventually found work that enabled him to live, though this did not come immediately, as is proved by an anecdote, related by himself, of his early days there. A Syrian peddler employed him to help dispose of some accumulated wares, sending him out with a consignment of small mirrors. Certainly no human being was more unfitted by nature for successful peddling than Lafcadio Hearn, and at the end of the day he returned to the Syrian with the consignment intact. Setting down his burden to apologize for his failure he put his foot accidentally upon one of the mirrors, and thrown into a panic by the sound of the splintering glass, he fled incontinently, and never saw the merchant again, nor ever again attempted mercantile pursuits.

The first regular work he obtained was as a type-setter and proof-reader in the Robert Clarke Company, where—as he mentions in one of his letters—he endeavoured to introduce reforms in the American methods of punctuation, and assimilate it more closely to the English standards, but without, as he confesses, any success. It was from some of these struggles for typographical changes, undertaken with hot-headed enthusiasm for perfection, that he derived his nickname of “Old Semicolon,” given him in amiable derision by his fellows. Mechanical work of this character could not satisfy him long, though the experience was useful to the young artist in words beginning his laborious self-training in the use of his tools. Punctuation and typographical form remained for him always a matter of profound importance, and in one of his letters he declared that he would rather abandon all the royalties to his publisher than be deprived of the privilege of correcting his own proofs; corrections which in their amplitude often devoured in printer’s charges the bulk of his profits.

LAFCADIO HEARN
About 1873

Later he secured, for a brief period, a position as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, at that time librarian of the public library of Cincinnati, and here again he found food for his desires in a free access to the recondite matters to which already his genius was tending; but again he was driven by poverty and circumstance into broader fields, and early in 1874 he was working as a general reporter on the Cincinnati Enquirer. His work was of a kind that gave him at first no scope for his talents and must have been peculiarly unsympathetic, consisting of daily market reports, until chance opened the eyes of his employers to his capacity for better things. A peculiarly atrocious crime, still known in Cincinnati annals as the “Tan-yard Murder,” had been communicated to the office of the Enquirer at a moment when all the members of the staff, usually detailed to cover such assignments, were absent. The editor calling upon the indifferent gods for some one instantly to take up the matter, was surprised by a timid request from the shy cub-reporter who turned in daily market “stuff,” to be allowed to deal with this tragedy, and after some demur, he consented to accept what appeared an inadequate answer from the adjured deities. The “copy” submitted some hours later caused astonished eyebrows, was considered worthy of “scare-heads,” and for the nine succeeding days of the life of the wonder, Cincinnati sought ardently the Hoffmannesque story whose poignantly chosen phrases set before them a grim picture that caused the flesh to crawl upon their bones. It was realized at once that the cub-reporter had unsuspected capacities and his talents were allowed expansion in the direction of descriptive stories. One of the most admired of these was a record of a visit to the top of the spire of St. Peter’s Cathedral, where hauled in ropes by a steeple-jack to the arms of the cross which crowned it, he obtained a lofty view of the city and returned to write an article that enabled all the town to see the great panorama through his myopic eyes, which yet could bear testimony to colour and detail not obvious to clearer vision.

It was in this year that some trusting person was found willing to advance a small sum of money for the publication of an amorphous little Sunday sheet, professedly comic and satiric, entitled Ye Giglampz. H. F. Farny contributed the cartoons, and Lafcadio Hearn the bulk of the text. On June 21st of that year the first number appeared, with the announcement that it was to be “published daily, except week days,” and was to be “devoted to art, literature, and satire.” The first page was adorned with a Dicky Doylish picture of Herr Kladderadatsch presenting Mr. Giglampz to an enthusiastic public, which showed decided talent, but the full page cartoon, though it may have been amusing when published, is satire turned dry and dusty after the lapse of thirty-two years, and it may be only vaguely discerned now to refer in some way to the question of a third term for President Grant.

The pictures are easily preferable to the text, though no doubt it too has suffered from the desiccation of time, but Lafcadio Hearn was at no time, one might infer, better fitted for satire than for peddling; Ye Giglampz plainly “jooks wi’ deefeculty,” and the young journalist’s views upon art and politics are such as might be expected from a boy of twenty-four.

The prohibition question, the Chicago fire, a local river disaster, and the Beecher scandal are all dealt with by pen and pencil, much clipping from Punch and some translations from the comic journals of Paris fill the columns, and after nine weeks Ye Giglampz met an early and well-deserved death. The only copies of the paper now known to be in existence are contained in a bound volume belonging to Mr. Farny, discovered by him in a second-hand bookshop, with some pencil notes in the margin in Hearn’s handwriting. One of these notes records that an advertisement—there were but three in the first number—was never paid for, so presumably this volume, monument of an unfortunate juvenile exploit, was once in Hearn’s meagre library, but was discarded when he left Cincinnati.

In the following year Hearn had left the Enquirer and was recording the Exposition of 1876 for the Gazette, and in the latter part of that year he was a regular reporter for the Commercial.

In 1895—writing to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain—Hearn speaks of John Cockerill, then visiting Japan, and draws an astonishingly vivid picture of the editor who was in command of the Cincinnati Enquirer in the ’70’s. These occasional trenchant, accurate sketches from life, to be found here and there in his correspondence, show a shrewdness of judgement and coolness of observation which his companions never suspected. He says:—

“I began daily newspaper work in 1874, in the city of Cincinnati, on a paper called the Enquirer edited by a sort of furious young man named Cockerill. He was a hard master, a tremendous worker, and a born journalist. I think none of us liked him, but we all admired his ability to run things. He used to swear at us, work us half to death (never sparing himself), and he had a rough skill in sarcasm that we were all afraid of. He was fresh from the army, and full of army talk. In a few years he had forced up the circulation of the paper to a very large figure and made a fortune for the proprietor, who got jealous of him and got rid of him.... He afterwards took hold of a St. Louis paper,—then of a New York daily, the World.... He ran the circulation up to nearly a quarter of a million, and again had the proprietor’s jealousy to settle with.... He also built up the Advertiser, but getting tired, sold out, and went travelling. Finally, Bennett of the Herald sends him to Japan at, I believe, $10,000 a year.

“I met him here to-day and talked over old times. He has become much gentler and more pleasant, and seems to be very kindly. He is also a little grey. What I have said about him shows that he is no very common person. The man who can make three or four fortunes for other men, without doing the same thing for himself, seldom is. He is not a literary man, nor a well-read man, nor a scholar,—but has immense common sense, and a large experience of life,—besides being, in a Mark-Twainish way, much of a humourist.”

Those who knew John Cockerill will find in this portrait not one line omitted which would make for truth and sympathy. One of Hearn’s associates of this period, Joseph Tunison, says of his work:—

“In Cincinnati such work was much harder than now, because more and better work was demanded of a man for his weekly stipend than at present.... Had he been then on a New York daily his articles would have attracted bidding from rival managements, but in Cincinnati there was little, if any, encouragement for such brilliant powers as his. The Commercial took him on at twenty dollars a week.... Though he worked hard for a pittance he never slighted anything he had to do.... He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment.... His employers kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper—the night stations—for in that field developed the most sensational events, and he was strongest in the unusual and the startling.”

For two years more this was the routine of his daily life. He formed, in spite of his shyness, some ties of intimacy; especially with Joseph Tunison, a man of unusual classical learning, with H. F. Farny, the artist, and with the now well-known musical critic and lecturer, H. E. Krehbiel. Into these companionships he threw all the ardour of a very young man; an ardour increased beyond even the usual intensity of young friendships, by the natural warmth of his feelings and the loneliness of his life, bereft of all those ties of family common to happier fates. In their company he developed a quality of bonhomie that underlay the natural seriousness of his temperament, and is frequently visible in his letters, breaking through the gravity of his usual trend of thought. Absence and time diminished but little his original enthusiasm, as the letters included in this volume will bear testimony, though in later years one by one his early friendships were chilled and abandoned. One of the charges frequently brought against Lafcadio Hearn by his critics in after years was that he was inconstant in his relations with his friends. Mr. Tunison says of him:—

“He had a fashion of dropping his friends one by one, or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing. Whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit would be hard to say, but he never spoke ill of them afterwards. He seemed to forget all about them, though two or three acquaintances of his early years of struggle and privation were always after spoken of with the tenderest regard, and their companionship was eagerly sought whenever this was possible.”

The charge of inconstancy is, to those who knew Lafcadio Hearn well, of a sufficiently serious nature to warrant some analysis at this point, while dealing with the subject of his first intimacies, for up to this period he appears to have had no ties other than those, so bitterly ruptured, with the people of his own blood, or the mere passing amities of school-boy life. That many of his closest friendships were either broken abruptly or sank into abeyance is quite true, but the reason for this was explicable in several ways. The first and most comprehensible cause was his inherent shyness of nature and an abnormal sensitiveness, which his early experiences intensified to a point not easily understood by those of a naturally self-confident temperament unqualified by blighting childish impressions. A look, a word, which to the ordinary robust nature would have had no meaning of importance, touched the quivering sensibilities of the man like a searing acid, and stung him to an anguish of resentment and bitterness which nearly always seemed fantastically out of proportion to the offender, and this bitterness was usually misjudged and resented. Only those cursed with similar sensibilities—“as tender as the horns of cockled snails”—could understand and forgive such an idiosyncrasy. It must be remembered that all qualities have their synchronous defects. The nature which is as reflective as water to the subtlest shades of the colour and form of life must of its essential character be subject to rufflement by the lightest breath of harshness or misconception.

Professor Chamberlain, who himself suffered from this tendency to unwarranted estrangement, has dealt with another phase of the matter with a noble sympathy too rare among Hearn’s friends. He says, in a letter to the biographer:—

“The second point was his attitude toward his friends,—his quondam friends,—all of whom he gradually dropped, with but very few exceptions. Some I know who were deeply and permanently irritated by this neglect, or ingratitude, as they termed it. I never could share such a feeling, though of course I lamented the severance of connection with one so gifted, and made two or three attempts at a renewal of intercourse, which were met at first by cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing me to desist from further endeavours. The reason I could not resent this was because Lafcadio’s dropping of his friends seemed to me to have its roots in that very quality which made the chief charm of his works. I mean his idealism. Friends, when he first made them, were for him more than mere mortal men, they stood endowed with every perfection. He painted them in the beautiful colours of his own fancy, and worshipped them, pouring out at their feet all the passionate emotionalism of his Greek nature. But Lafcadio was not emotional merely; another side of his mind had the keen insight of a man of science. Thus he soon came to see that his idols had feet of clay, and—being so purely subjective in his judgements—he was indignant with them for having, as he thought, deceived him. Add to this that the rigid character of his philosophical opinions made him perforce despise, as intellectual weaklings, all those who did not share them, or shared them only in a lukewarm manner,—and his disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable. For no man living, except himself, idolized Herbert Spencer in his peculiar way; turning Spencer’s scientific speculations into a kind of mysticism. This mysticism became a religion to him. The slightest cavil raised against it was resented by him as a sacrilege. Thus it was hardly possible for him to retain old ties of friendship except with a few men whom he met on the plane of every-day life apart from the higher intellectual interests. Lafcadio himself was a greater sufferer from all this than any one else; for he possessed the affectionate disposition of a child, and suffered poignantly when sympathy was withdrawn, or—what amounted to the same—when he himself withdrew it. He was much to be pitied,—always wishing to love, and discovering each time that his love had been misplaced.”

To put the matter in its simplest form, he loved with a completeness and tenderness extremely rare among human beings. When he discovered—as all who love in this fashion eventually do—that the objects of his affection had no such tenderness to give in return, he felt himself both deceived and betrayed and allowed the relation to pass into the silence of oblivion.

There is still another facet of this subject which is made clear by some of the letters written in the last years of his life, when he had withdrawn himself almost wholly from intercourse with all save his immediate family. Failing strength warned him that not many more years remained in which to complete his self-imposed task, and like a man who nears his goal with shortening breath and labouring pulse, he let slip one by one every burden, and cast from him his dearest possessions, lest even the weight of one love should hold him back from the final grasp upon the ideal he had so long pursued with avid heart. This matter has been dwelt upon at some length, and somewhat out of due place, but the charge of disloyalty to friendship is a serious one, and a full understanding of the facts upon which it rested is important to a comprehension of the man.

In these early days in Cincinnati, however, no blight had yet come upon his young friendships, and they proved a source of great delight. Krehbiel was already deeply immersed in studies of folk-songs and folk-music,—his collection of which has since become famous,—and Lafcadio threw himself with enthusiasm into similar studies, his natural love for exotic lore rendering them peculiarly sympathetic to his genius. Together they ransacked the libraries for discoveries, and sought knowledge at first hand from wandering minstrels in Chinese laundries, or from the exiles of many lands who gathered in the polyglot slums along the river-banks. In the dedication of “Some Chinese Ghosts” is recorded an echo of one of these experiences, when Krehbiel opened the heart of a reserved Oriental to give up to them all his knowledge, by proving that he himself could play their strange instruments and sing their century-old songs. The dedication runs thus:—

To My Friend,
Henry Edward Krehbiel,
The Musician,
Who, Speaking the Speech of Melody unto the
Children of Ten-Hia,—
Unto the Wandering Tsing-Jin, Whose Skins
Have the Colour of Gold,—
Moved Them to Make Strange Sounds upon the
Serpent-Bellied San-Hien;
Persuaded Them to Play for Me upon the
Shrieking Ya-Hien;
Prevailed on Them to Sing Me a Song of Their
Native Land,—
The Song of Mohli-Wa.
The Song of the Jasmine-Flower.

This dedication is of peculiar interest; “Chinese Ghosts” has been long out of print, and of the few copies issued—nearly the whole edition was destroyed—but a handful still exist. It gives a typical example of the musical, rhythmic prose which the young reporter was endeavouring to master. He had fallen under the spell of the French Romantic school and of their passion for le mot juste, of their love for exotic words, of their research for the grotesque, the fantastic, the bizarre. Already out of his tiny income he was extracting what others in like case spent upon comforts or pleasures, to buy dictionaries and thesauri, and was denying himself food and clothes to purchase rare books. The works of Théophile Gautier were his daily companions, in which he saturated his mind with fantasies of the Orient, Spain, and Egypt, refreshing himself after the dull routine of the day’s work with endeavours to transliterate into English the strange and monstrous tales of his model, those abnormal imaginations whose alien aroma almost defied transference into a less supple tongue.

His friend Tunison, writing of Hearn at this period, says:—

“But it was impossible for even this slavery of journalism to crush out of him his determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of the morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of 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 from Gautier.”

These translations—including “Clarimonde,” “Arria Marcella,” and “King Candaule”—with three others were published in 1882 under the title of the initial tale, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” having been gathered from the “Nouvelles,” and the “Romans et Contes.” The preface concludes thus:

“It is the artist who must judge of Gautier’s creations. To the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, to the lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth,—of the charm of youthful dreams and young passion in its blossoming,—of poetic ambitions and the sweet pantheism that finds all Nature vitalized by the Spirit of the Beautiful,—to such the first English version of these graceful phantasies is offered in the hope that it may not be found wholly unworthy of the original.”

Up to this time no translation into English of Gautier’s “Contes” had been attempted, and the manuscript sought a publisher in vain for half a dozen years. Later, when the little volume had reached a small but appreciative audience, another English version was attempted by Andrew Lang, but proved an unsuccessful rival, lacking the warmth and fidelity of its predecessor.

Other attempts in the same direction met with no better success, partly, in some cases, because of the reluctance any Anglo-Saxon publisher inevitably feels in issuing works which would encounter no barriers of rigid decorum between themselves and the world of French readers. The youthful artist working in any medium is prone to be impatient of the prejudices of Anglo-Saxon pudency. The beautiful is to him always its own justification for being, and his inexperience makes him unafraid of the nudities of art. The refusal to deal freely with any form of beauty seems to him as bloodlessly pietistic as the priest’s excision of “the breasts of the nymphs in the brake.” Yet many years after, when the boy had himself become the father of a boy and began to think of his son’s future, he said: “What shall I do with him? ... send him to grim Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord?—I am beginning to think that really much of the ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded on the best experience of man under civilization; and I understand lots of things I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom.”

This unavailing struggle to find an outlet for the expression of something more worthy of his abilities than the sensational side of journalism caused him the deepest discouragement and depression; and his youthful ardour, denied a safe channel for its forces, turned to less healthful instincts. The years in Cincinnati were at times marred by experiments and outbursts, undertaken with bitter enthusiasm for fantastic ethical codes, and finally caused severance of his ties with his employers and the town itself. The tendency of his tastes toward the study of strange peoples and civilizations made him find much that was attractive in “the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, and led him to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study,”—says Joseph Tunison,—“things that were common to these people in their every-day life his vivid imagination transformed into romance.”

This led him eventually into impossible experiments, and brought upon him the resentment of his friends. Many years after, in Japan, he referred to this matter in a letter to one of his pupils, and the letter is so illuminative of this matter as to make it desirable to insert it here, though rightly it should be included in the volume dealing with his life in Japan.

Dear Ochiai,—I was very happy to get your kind letter, and the pleasant news it conveyed....

And now that all your trouble is over, perhaps you will sometimes find it hard not to feel angry with those who ostracized you for so long. It would at least be natural that you should feel angry with them, or with some at least. But I hope you will not allow yourself to feel anger towards them, even in your heart. Because the real truth is that it was not really your schoolmates who were offended: it only appeared so. The real feeling against you was what is called a national sentiment,—that jealous love of country with which every man is born, and which you, quite unknowingly, turned against you for a little while. So I hope you will love all your schoolmates none the less,—even though they treated you distantly for so long.

When I was a young man in my twenties, I had an experience very like yours. I resolved to take the part of some people who were much disliked in the place where I lived. I thought that those who disliked them were morally wrong,—so I argued boldly for them and went over to their side. Then all the rest of the people stopped speaking to me, and I hated them for it. But I was too young then to understand. There were other moral questions, much larger than those I had been arguing about, which really caused the whole trouble. The people did not know how to express them very well; they only felt them. After some years I discovered that I was quite mistaken—that I was under a delusion. I had been opposing a great national and social principle without knowing it. And if my best friends had not got angry with me, I could not have learned the truth so well,—because there are many things that are hard to explain and can only be taught by experience....

Ever very affectionately,

Your old teacher,

Lafcadio Hearn.

Kumamoto, March 27, 1894.

Sick, unhappy, and unpopular, flight to other scenes naturally suggested itself. Mr. Tunison thus describes the influences determining the move to New Orleans, which occurred in 1877:—

“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 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 the Gulf State. It was something about an old mansion of an ante-bellum cotton prince, with its white columns, its beautiful avenue of trees; the whitewashed negro quarters stretching away in the background; the cypress and live-oaks hung with moss, the odours from the blossoming magnolias, the songs of the mocking-birds in the early sunlight.”

Hearn took in every word of this with great keenness of interest, as was shown by the usual dilation of his nostrils when excited, though he had little to say at the time. It was as though he could see, and hear, and smell the delights of the scene. Not long after on leaving for New Orleans he remarked:—

“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.”

Though nostalgia for Southern warmth had given a purpose to his wanderings, the immediate cause of his leaving the paper on which he was employed in Cincinnati was his assignment to deal with a story of hydrophobia, in which he suspected he had been given some misleading information by his superiors; and though his suspicions were possibly unjust, he announced that he had lost his loyalty to the paper and abruptly quitted it.

It is said that he went first to Memphis on leaving Cincinnati, but no proof of this remains save an anecdote he once related, placing the scene of it in Tennessee.

The question of essential wrong and right being under discussion, his companion advanced the theory that morals varied so much with localities and conditions that it was impossible to decide that there was any act of which one might say that it was essentially wrong or essentially right. After thinking this over in his brooding manner, he said:—

“Yes, there is one thing that is always wrong, profoundly wrong under any conditions.”

“And that?” he was asked.

“To cause pain to a helpless creature for one’s own pleasure,” was his answer; and then, in illustration, continued: “Once I was walking along a road in Tennessee, and I saw a man who seemed intoxicated with rage—for what cause I don’t know. A kitten was crossing the road at the moment. It got under the man’s feet and tripped him. He caught it up and blinded it and flung it from him with a laugh. The act seemed to soothe his rage. I was not near enough to stop him, but I had a pistol in my pocket—I always carried one then—and I fired four times at him; but, you know my sight is so bad, I missed him.” After a few moments he added, “It has always been one of the regrets of my life that I missed.”

Sometime in 1877—the time of the year is uncertain—Hearn arrived in New Orleans, and from this date the work of a biographer becomes almost superfluous, for then was begun the admirable series of letters to H. E. Krehbiel, which record the occupations and interests of his life for the next twelve years, setting forth, as no one less gifted than himself could, the impressions he received, the development of his mind, the trend of his studies, the infinite labour by which he slowly built up his mastery of the English tongue and the methods of work which made him eventually one of the great stylists of the Nineteenth Century. These letters make clear, as no comment could adequately do, how unflinchingly he pursued his purpose to become an artist, through long discouragement, through poverty and self-sacrifice; make clear how the Dream never failed to lead him, and how broad a foundation of study and discipline he laid during his apprenticeship for the structure he was later to rear for his own monument. They also disclose, as again no comment could do, the modesty of his self-appreciation, and the essentially enthusiastic and affectionate nature of his character.

The first work he secured in New Orleans was on the staff of the Daily Item, one of the minor journals, where he read proof, clipped exchanges, wrote editorials, and occasionally contributed a translation, or some bit of original work in the shape of what came to be known as his “Fantastics.” Meanwhile he was rejoicing in the change of residence, for the old, dusty, unpaved squalid New Orleans of the ’70’s—the city crushed into inanition by war, poverty, pestilence, and the frenzy of carpet-bagger misrule—was far more sympathetic to his tastes than the prosperous growing town he had abandoned.

The gaunt, melancholy great houses where he lodged in abandoned, crumbling apartments,—still decorated with the tattered splendours of a prosperous past,—where he was served by timid unhappy gentlewomen, or their ex-servants; the dim flower-hung courts behind the blank, mouldering walls; the street-cries; the night-songs of wanderers—all the colourful, polyglot, half-tropical life of the town was a constant appeal to the romantic side of the young man’s nature. Of disease and danger—arising out of the conditions of the unhappy city—he took no thought till after the great epidemic of yellow fever which desolated New Orleans the following summer, during which he suffered severely from dengue, a lighter form of the disease. But even the cruelties of his new home were of value to him. In the grim closing chapter of “Chita” the anguish of a death by yellow fever is set forth with a quivering reality which only a personal knowledge of some phases of the disease could have made possible.

Always pursued by a desire to free himself of the harness of daily journalism, he plunged into experiments in economy, reducing at one time his expenses for food to but two dollars a week; trusting his hardly gathered savings to a sharper who owned a restaurant, and who ran away when the enterprise proved a failure. On another occasion he put by everything beyond his bare necessities in one of the mushroom building-loan societies which sprang up all over the country at that time, and with the collapse of this investment he finally and forever abandoned further financial enterprises, regarding them with an absolutely comic distrust, though for some years he continued to dwell now and then on the possibility of starting second-hand bookshops in hopelessly impossible places—such as the then moribund town of St. Augustine, Florida—and would suggest, with lovably absurd naïveté, that a shrewd man could do well there.

Meanwhile his gluttony for rare books on recondite matters kept him constantly poor, but proved a far better investment, as tools of trade, than his other and more speculative expenditures. Eventually he gathered a library of several hundred volumes and of considerable value, together with an interesting series of scrapbooks containing his earlier essays in literary journalism, and other clippings showing his characteristic flair for the exotic and the strange.

In 1881 he, by great good fortune, was brought into contact with the newly consolidated Times-Democrat, a journal whose birth marked one of the earliest impulses towards the regeneration of the long depressed community, and whose staff included men, such as Charles Whitney, Honoré Burthe, and John Augustin, who represented the best impulses toward new growth among both the American and Creole members of the city’s population. Of Page M. Baker, the editor-in-chief, he drew in after years this faithful pen-picture:—

“You say my friend writes nicely. He is about the most lovable man I ever met,—an old-time Southerner, very tall and slight, with a singular face. He is so exactly the ideal Mephistopheles that he would never get his photograph taken. The face does not altogether belie the character,—but the mockery is very tender play, and queerly original. It never offends. The real Mephistopheles appears only when there are ugly obstacles to overcome. Then the diabolic keenness with which motives are read and disclosed, and the lightning moves by which a plot is checkmated, or a net made for the plotter himself, usually startle people. He is a man of immense force,—it takes such a one to rule in that community,—but as a gentleman I never saw his superior in grace or consideration. I always loved him—but like all whom I like could never get quite enough of his company for myself.”

It was an unusual and delightful coterie of men with whom chance had associated him. Men peculiarly fitted to value his special gifts. Honoré Burthe was the ideal of the “beau sabreur” of romantic French tradition, personally beautiful, brave to absurdity; a soldier of fortune under many flags; withal the pink of gentle courtesy, and a scholar. John Augustin—with less of the “panache”—inherited also the beauty, courage, and breeding of those picturesque ancestors, who had made the French gentleman-adventurers the most ornamental colonists of North America. Charles Whitney, by contrast, had fallen heir to all the shrewd, humorous, amiable vigour of the rival race which had struggled successfully for possession of the great inheritance of America, and which finally met and fused with the Latins in Louisiana.

Among these four rather uncommon types of journalists Lafcadio Hearn found ready sympathy and appreciation, and a chance to develop in the direction of his talents and desires. He was treated by them with courtesy and an indulgent consideration of his idiosyncrasies new in his experience, and was allowed to expand along the natural line of his tastes and capacities, with the result that he soon began to attract attention, and was finally able to find his outlet in the direction to which his preparatory labours and inherent genius were urging him.

He was astonishingly fortunate to have found such companions and such an opportunity. At that period the new journalism was dominant almost everywhere, and perhaps nowhere in the United States, except in New Orleans,—with its large French population and its residuum of the antebellum leisurely cultivation of taste, and love of lordly beauties of style,—could he have found an audience and a daily newspaper which eagerly sought, and rewarded to the best of its ability, a type of belles-lettres which was caviare to the general. His first work consisted of a weekly translation from some French writer—Théophile Gautier, Guy de Maupassant, or Pierre Loti, whose books he was one of the first to introduce to English readers, and for whose beautiful literary manner he always retained the most enthusiastic admiration. Long years afterward in Japan he spoke of one of the worst afflictions of a recent illness as having been the fear that he should die without having finished Loti’s “L’Inde sans les Anglais,” which he was reading when seized by the malady. These translations were usually accompanied—in another part of the paper—by an editorial, elucidatory of either the character and method of the author, or the subject of the paper itself, and these editorials were often vehicles of much curious research on a multitude of odd subjects, such as the famous swordsmen of history, Oriental dances and songs, muezzin calls, African music, historic lovers, Talmudic legends, monstrous literary exploits, and the like; echoes of which studies appear frequently in the Krehbiel and O’Connor letters in this volume.

From time to time he added transferences, and adaptations, or original papers, unsigned, which found a small but appreciative audience, some of whom were sufficiently interested to enquire the identity of the author, and who grew into a local clientèle which always thereafter followed the growth of his fame with warm interest. Among these “Fantastics” and translations was published the whole contents of his three early books—“One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” “Stray Leaves from Strange Literature,” and “Some Chinese Ghosts”—but these books were made only of such selections as an ever increasing severity of taste considered worthy of reproduction. Much delightful matter which failed quite to reach this standard lapsed into extinction in the files of the journal. Among these was one which has been recovered by chance from his later correspondence. Replying to a criticism by a friend of the use of the phrase “lentor inexpressible” in a manuscript submitted for judgement, he promises to delete it, speaks of it as a “trick phrase” of his, and encloses the old clipping to show where he had first used it, and adds “please burn or tear up after reading ... this essay belongs to the Period of Gush.”

Fortunately his correspondent—as did most of those to whom he wrote—treasured everything in his handwriting, and the fragment which bore—my impression is—the title of “A Dead Love” (the clipping lacks its caption) remains to give an example of some of the work that bears the flaws of his ’prentice hand, before he used his tools with the assured skill of a master:—

... No rest he knew because of her. Even in the night his heart was ever startled from slumber as by the echo of her footfall; and dreams mocked him with tepid fancies of her lips; and when he sought forgetfulness in strange kisses her memory ever came shadowing between.... So that, weary of his life, he yielded it up at last in the fevered summer of a tropical city,—dying with her name upon his lips. And his face was no more seen in the palm-shadowed streets, ... but the sun rose and sank even as before.

And that vague Something which lingers a little while within the tomb where the body moulders, lingered and dreamed within the long dark resting-place where they had laid him with the pious hope—Que en paz descanse!...

Yet so weary of his life had the Wanderer been, that the repose of the dead was not for him. And while the body shrank and sank into dust, the phantom man found no rest in the darkness, and thought dimly to himself: “I am even too weary to find peace!”

There was a thin crevice in the ancient wall of the tomb. And through it, and through the meshes of the web that a spider had woven athwart it, the dead looked and beheld the amethystine blaze of the summer sky,—and pliant palms bending in the warm wind,—and the opaline glow of the horizon,—and fair pools bearing images of cypresses inverted,—and the birds that flitted from tomb to tomb and sang,—and flowers in the shadow of the sepulchres.... And the vast bright world seemed to him not so hateful as before.

Likewise the sounds of life assailed the faint senses of the dead through the thin crevice in the wall of the tomb:—always the far-off drowsy murmur made by the toiling of the city’s heart; sometimes sounds of passing converse and steps,—echoes of music and of laughter,—chanting and chattering of children at play,—and the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women.... So that the dead man dreamed of life and strength and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been, and of that which might have been, and of that which now could never be. And he longed at last to live again—seeing that there was no rest in the tomb.

But the gold-born days died in golden fire; and blue nights unnumbered filled the land with indigo shadows; and the perfume of the summer passed like a breath of incense ... and the dead within the sepulchre could not wholly die.

Stars in their courses peered down through the crevices of the tomb, and twinkled, and passed on; winds of the sea shrieked to him through the widening crannies of the tomb; birds sang above him and flew to other lands; the bright lizards that ran noiselessly over his bed of stone, as noiselessly departed; the spider at last ceased to repair her web of silk; years came and went with lentor inexpressible; but for the dead there was no rest!

And after many tropical moons had waxed and waned, and the summer was deepening in the land, filling the golden air with tender drowsiness and passional perfume, it strangely came to pass that She whose name had been murmured by his lips when the Shadow of Death fell upon him, came to that city of palms, and even unto the ancient place of sepulture, and unto the tomb that bore his name.

And he knew the whisper of her raiment—knew the sweetness of her presence—and the pallid hearts of the blossoms of a plant whose blind roots had found food within the crevice of the tomb, changed and flushed, and flamed incarnadine....

But she—perceiving it not—passed by; and the sound of her footstep died away forever.

To his own, and perhaps other middle-aged taste “A Dead Love” may seem negligible, but to those still young enough, as he himself then was, to credit passion with a potency not only to survive “the gradual furnace of the world” but even to blossom in the dust of graves, this stigmatization as “Gush” will seem as unfeeling as always does to the young the dry and sapless wisdom of granddams. To them any version of the Orphic myth is tinglingly credible. Yearningly desirous that the brief flower of life may never fade, such a cry finds an echo in the very roots of their inexperienced hearts. The smouldering ardour of its style, which a chastened judgement rejected, was perhaps less faulty than its author believed it to be in later years.

It was to my juvenile admiration for this particular bit of work that I owed the privilege of meeting Lafcadio Hearn, in the winter of 1882, and of laying the foundation of a close friendship which lasted without a break until the day of his death.

He was at this time a most unusual and memorable person. About five feet three inches in height, with unusually broad and powerful shoulders for such a stature, there was an almost feminine grace and lightness in his step and movements. His feet were small and well shaped, but he wore invariably the most clumsy and neglected shoes, and his whole dress was peculiar. His favourite coat, both winter and summer, was a heavy double-breasted “reefer,” while the size of his wide-brimmed, soft-crowned hat was a standing joke among his friends. The rest of his garments were apparently purchased for the sake of durability rather than beauty, with the exception of his linen, which, even in days of the direst poverty, was always fresh and good. Indeed a peculiar physical cleanliness was characteristic of him—that cleanliness of uncontaminated savages and wild animals, which has the air of being so essential and innate as to make the best-groomed men and domesticated beasts seem almost frowzy by contrast. His hands were very delicate and supple, with quick timid movements that were yet full of charm, and his voice was musical and very soft. He spoke always in short sentences, and the manner of his speech was very modest and deferential. His head was quite remarkably beautiful; the profile both bold and delicate, with admirable modelling of the nose, lips and chin. The brow was square, and full above the eyes, and the complexion a clear smooth olive. The enormous work which he demanded of his vision had enlarged beyond its natural size the eye upon which he depended for sight, but originally, before the accident,—whose disfiguring effect he magnified and was exaggeratedly sensitive about,—his eyes must have been handsome, for they were large, of a dark liquid brown, and heavily lashed. In conversation he frequently, almost instinctively, placed his hand over the injured eye to conceal it from his companion.

Though he was abnormally shy, particularly with strangers and women, this was not obvious in any awkwardness of manner; he was composed and dignified, though extremely silent and reserved until his confidence was obtained. With those whom he loved and trusted his voice and mental attitude were caressing, affectionate, and confiding, though with even these some chance look or tone or gesture would alarm him into sudden and silent flight, after which he might be invisible for days or weeks, appearing again as silently and suddenly, with no explanation of his having so abruptly taken wing. In spite of his limited sight he appeared to have the power to divine by some extra sense the slightest change of expression in the faces of those with whom he talked, and no object or tint escaped his observation. One of his habits while talking was to walk about, touching softly the furnishings of the room, or the flowers of the garden, picking up small objects for study with his pocket-glass, and meantime pouring out a stream of brilliant talk in a soft, half-apologetic tone, with constant deference to the opinions of his companions. Any idea advanced he received with respect, however much he might differ, and if a phrase or suggestion appealed to him his face lit with a most delightful irradiation of pleasure, and he never forgot it.

A more delightful or—at times—more fantastically witty companion it would be impossible to imagine, but it is equally impossible to attempt to convey his astounding sensitiveness. To remain on good terms with him it was necessary to be as patient and wary as one who stalks the hermit thrush to its nest. Any expression of anger or harshness to any one drove him to flight, any story of moral or physical pain sent him quivering away, and a look of ennui or resentment, even if but a passing emotion, and indulged in while his back was turned, was immediately conveyed to his consciousness in some occult fashion and he was off in an instant. Any attempt to detain or explain only increased the length of his absence. A description of his eccentricities of manner would be misleading if the result were to convey an impression of neurotic debility, for with this extreme sensitiveness was combined vigour of mind and body to an unusual degree—the delicacy was only of the spirit.

Mrs. Lylie Harris of New Orleans, one of his intimate friends at this time, in an article written after his death, speaks of his friendship with the children of her family, with whom he was an affectionate playfellow, and with whom he was entirely confident and at his ease. An equally friendly and confident relation existed between himself and the old negro woman who cared for his rooms (as clean and plain as a soldier’s), and indeed all his life he was happiest with the young and the simple, who never perplexed or disturbed him by the complexities of modern civilization, which all his life he distrusted and feared.

Among those attracted by his work in the Times-Democrat was W. D. O’Connor, in the marine service of the government, who wrote to enquire the name of the author of an article on Gustave Doré. From this grew a correspondence extending over several years. Jerome A. Hart, of San Francisco, was another correspondent attracted by his work, to whom he wrote from time to time, even after his residence in Japan had begun. Mr. Hart in contributing his letters says that this correspondence began in 1882, through the following reference in the pages of the Argonaut to “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”:—

“Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, a talented writer on the staff of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, has just translated some of Gautier’s fantastic romances, under the name of ‘One of Cleopatra’s Nights.’ The book comprises six fascinating stories—the one which gives the title, ‘Clarimonde,’ ‘Arria Marcella, a Souvenir of Pompeii,’ ‘The Mummy’s Foot,’ ‘Omphale, a Rococo Story,’ and ‘King Candaule.’ Mr. Hearn has few equals in this country as regards translation, and the stories lose nothing of their artistic unity in his hands. But his hobby is literalism. For instance, of the epitaph in ‘Clarimonde,’—

‘Ici-gît Clarimonde,

Qui fut de son vivant

La plus belle du monde,’

he remarks: ‘The broken beauty of the lines is but inadequately rendered thus:—

‘Here lies Clarimonde,

Who was famed in her lifetime

As the fairest of women.’

Very true—it is inadequate. But why not vary it? For example:—

Here lieth Clarimonde,

Who was, what time she lived,

The loveliest in the land.

The fleeting archaic flavour of the original is not entirely lost here, and the lines are broken, yet metrical. But this is only a suggestion, and a kindly one.”

This book—his first—travelled far before finding a publisher, and then only at the cost of the author bearing half the expense of publication.

Other notices had been less kind. The Observer, as he quotes in a letter to Mr. Hart, had declared that it was a collection of “stories of unbridled lust without the apology of natural passion,” and that “the translation reeked with the miasma of the brothel.” The Critic had wasted no time upon the translator, confining itself to depreciation of Gautier, and this Hearn resented more than severity to himself, for at this period Gautier and his style were his passionate delight, as witness the following note which accompanied a loan of a volume containing a selection from the Frenchman’s poems:—

Dear Miss Bisland,—I venture to try to give you a little novel pleasure by introducing you to the “Emaux et Camées.” As you have told me you never read them, I feel sure you will experience a literary surprise. You will find in Gautier a perfection of melody, a warmth of word-colouring, a voluptuous delicacy which no English poet has ever approached and which reveal, I think, a certain capacity of artistic expression no Northern tongue can boast. What the Latin tongues yield in to Northern languages is strength; but the themes in which the Latin poets excel are usually soft and exquisite. Still you will find in the “Rondalla” some fine specimens of violence. It is the song of the Toreador Juan.

These “Emaux et Camées” constitute Gautier’s own pet selection from his works. I have seen nothing in Hugo’s works to equal some of them.... I won’t presume to offer you this copy: it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this “parfait magicien des lettres françaises” (as Baudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy....

Mr. John Albee wrote to him in connection with the book, and also the Reverend Wayland D. Ball.

“Stray Leaves from Strange Literature”—published by James R. Osgood and Company of Boston—followed in 1884 and was more kindly treated by the critics, though it brought fewer letters from private admirers, and was not very profitable—save to his reputation. In 1885 a tiny volume was issued under the title of “Gombo Zhêbes,” being a collection of 350 Creole proverbs which he had made while studying the patois of the Louisiana negro—a patois of which the local name is “Gombo.” These laborious studies of the grammar and oral literature of a tongue spoken only by and to negro servants in Louisiana seemed rather a work of supererogation at the time, but later during his life in the West Indies they proved of incalculable value to him in his intercourse with the inhabitants. There the patois—not having been subjected as in New Orleans to that all-absorbing solvent of the English tongue—continued to hold its own alongside the pure French of the educated Creoles, and his book would have been impossible had he not had command of the universal speech of the common people.

“Some Chinese Ghosts” had set out on its travels in search of a publisher sometime earlier, and after several rejections was finally, in the following year, accepted by Roberts Brothers. In regard to some corrections which they desired made in the text this reference has been found in a letter to his friend Krehbiel, a letter in which, however, time and the ruthless appetite of bookworms have made havoc with words here and there:—

1886.

Dear K.,—In Promethean agony I write.

Roberts Brothers, Boston, have written me that they want to publish “Chinese Ghosts;” but want me to cut out a multitude of Japanese, Sanscrit, Chinese, and Buddhist terms.

Thereupon unto them I despatched a colossal document of supplication and prayer,—citing Southey, Moore, Flaubert, Edwin Arnold, Gautier, “Hiawatha,” and multitudinous singers and multitudinous songs, and the rights of prose poetry, and the supremacy of Form.

And no answer have I yet received.

How shall I sacrifice Orientalism, seeing that this my work was inspired by [fragment of a Greek word] by the Holy Spirit, by the Vast ... [probably Blue Soul] of the Universe ... but one of the facets of that million-faceted Rose-diamond which flasheth back the light of the Universal Sun? And even as Apocalyptic John I hold—

“And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”

Thy brother in the Holy Ghost of Art wisheth thee many benisons and victories, and the Grace that cometh as luminous rain and the Wind of Inspiration perfumed with musk and the flowers of Paradise.

Lafcadio.

This suggestion was peculiarly afflicting because of his love of exotic words, not only for their own sake, but for the colour they lent to the general scheme of decoration of his style. It was as if a painter of an Oriental picture had been asked to omit all reproduction of Eastern costumes, all representation of the architecture or utensils germane to his scene. To eliminate these foreign terms was like asking a modern actor to play “Julius Caesar” in a full-bottomed wig.

At about this period a friendship formed with Lieutenant Oscar Crosby exerted a most profound and far-reaching influence upon Hearn—an influence which continued to grow until his whole life and manner of thought were coloured by it.

Lieutenant Crosby was a young Louisianian, educated at West Point, and then stationed in New Orleans, a person of very unusual abilities, and Hearn found him a suggestive and inspiring companion. In a letter written to Ernest Crosby from Japan in 1904, but a month before his death, he says:—

“A namesake of yours, a young lieutenant in the United States Army, first taught me, about twenty years ago, how to study Herbert Spencer. To that Crosby I shall always feel a very reverence of gratitude, and I shall always find myself inclined to seek the good opinion of any man bearing the name of Crosby.”

To Mr. Krehbiel in the same year that he began the study of “The Principles of Ethics” he wrote:—

“Talking of change in opinions, I am really astonished at myself. You know what my fantastic metaphysics were. A friend disciplined me to read Herbert Spencer. I suddenly discovered what a waste of time all my Oriental metaphysics had been. I also discovered for the first time how to apply the little general knowledge I possessed. I also found unspeakable comfort in the sudden, and for me eternal reopening of the Great Doubt, which renders pessimism ridiculous, and teaches a new reverence for all forms of faith. In short, from the day when I finished the ‘First Principles,’ a totally new intellectual life opened for me; and I hope during the next few years to devour the rest of this oceanic philosophy.”

He seems not, in these positive assertions, to have overestimated the great change that had come upon his mental attitude. The strong breath of the great thinker had blown from off his mind the froth and ferment of youth, leaving the wine clear and strong beneath. From this time becomes evident a new seriousness in his manner, and beauty became to him not only the mere grace of form but the meaning and truth which that form was to embody.

The next book bearing his name shows the effect of this change, and the immediate success of the book demonstrated that, while his love for the exotic was to remain ingrained, he had learned to bring the exotic into vital touch with the normal.

“Chita: A Story of Last Island” had its origin in a visit paid in the summer of 1884 to Grande Isle, one of the islands lying in the Gulf of Mexico, near the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Bay of Barataria. A letter written to Page Baker while there may be inserted at this point to give some idea of the place.

Dear Page,—I wish you were here; for I am sure that the enjoyment would do you a great deal of good. I had not been in sea-water for fifteen years, and you can scarcely imagine how I rejoice in it,—in fact I don’t like to get out of it at all. I suppose you have not been at Grande Isle—or at least not been here for so long that you have forgotten what it looks like. It makes a curious impression on me: the old plantation cabins, standing in rows like village-streets, and neatly remodelled for more cultivated inhabitants, have a delightfully rural aspect under their shadowing trees; and there is a veritable country calm by day and night. Grande Isle has suggestions in it of several old country fishing villages I remember, but it is even still more charmingly provincial. The hotel proper, where the tables are laid,—formerly, I fancy, a sugar-house or something of that sort,—reminds one of nothing so much as one of those big English or Western barn-buildings prepared for a holiday festival or a wedding-party feast. The only distinctively American feature is the inevitable Southern gallery with white wooden pillars. An absolutely ancient purity of morals appears to prevail here:—no one thinks of bolts or locks or keys, everything is left open and nothing is ever touched. Nobody has ever been robbed on the island. There is no iniquity. It is like a resurrection of the days of good King Alfred, when, if a man were to drop his purse on the highway, he might return six months later to find it untouched. At least that is what I am told. Still I would not like to leave one thousand golden dinars on the beach or in the middle of the village. I am still a little suspicious—having been so long a dweller in wicked cities.

I was in hopes that I had made a very important discovery; viz.—a flock of really tame and innocuous cows; but the innocent appearance of the beasts is, I have just learned, a disguise for the most fearful ferocity. So far I have escaped unharmed; and Marion has offered to lend me his large stick, which will, I have no doubt, considerably aid me in preserving my life.

Couldn’t you manage to let me stay down here until after the Exposition is over, doing no work and nevertheless drawing my salary regularly?... By the way, one could save money by a residence at Grande Isle. There are no temptations—except the perpetual and delicious temptation of the sea.

The insects here are many; but I have seen no frogs,—they have probably found that the sea can outroar them and have gone away jealous. But in Marion’s room there is a beam, and against that beam there is the nest of a “mud-dauber.” Did you ever see a mud-dauber?

It is something like this when flying;—but when it isn’t flying I can’t tell you what it looks like, and it has the peculiar power of flying without noise. I think it is of the wasp-kind, and plasters its mud nest in all sorts of places. It is afraid of nothing—likes to look at itself in the glass, and leaves its young in our charge. There is another sociable creature—hope it isn’t a wasp—which has built two nests under the edge of this table on which I write to you. There are no specimens here of the cimex lectularius; and the mosquitoes are not at all annoying. They buzz a little, but seldom give evidence of hunger. Creatures also abound which have the capacity of making noises of the most singular sort. Up in the tree on my right there is a thing which keeps saying all day long, quite plainly, “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss!”—referring perhaps to the good young married folks across the way; and on the road to the bath-house, which we travelled late last evening in order to gaze at the phosphorescent sea, there dwells something which exactly imitates the pleasant sound of ice jingling in a cut-glass tumbler.

As for the grub, it is superb—solid, nutritious, and without stint. When I first tasted the butter I was enthusiastic, imagining that those mild-eyed cows had been instrumental in its production; but I have since discovered they were not—and the fact astonishes me not at all now that I have learned more concerning the character of those cows.

At some unearthly hour in the morning the camp-meeting quiet of the place is broken by the tolling of a bell.

This means “Jump up, lazybones; and take a swim before the sun rises.” Then the railroad-car comes for the bathers, passing up the whole line of white cottages. The distance is short to the beach; Marion and I prefer to walk; but the car is a great convenience for the women and children and invalids.

It is drawn by a single mule, and always accompanied by a dog which appears to be the intimate friend of the said mule, and who jumps up and barks all the grass-grown way.

The ladies’ bathing-house is about five minutes’ plank-walking from the men’s,—where I am glad to say drawers and bathing-suits are unnecessary, so that one has the full benefit of sun-bathing as well as salt-water bathing.

There is a man here called Margot or Margeaux—perhaps some distant relative of Château-Margeaux—who always goes bathing accompanied by a pet goose. The goose follows him just like a dog; but is a little afraid of getting into deep water. It remains in the surf presenting its stern-end to the breakers:—

The only trouble about the bathing is the ferocious sun. Few people bathe in the heat of the day, but yesterday we went in four times; and the sun nearly flayed us. This morning we held a council of war and decided upon greater moderation. There are three bars, between which the water is deep. The third bar is, I fear, too “risky” to reach, as it is nearly a mile from the other, and lies beyond a hundred-foot depth of water in which sharks are said to disport themselves. I am almost as afraid of sharks as I am of cows.... Marion made a dash for a drowning man yesterday, in answer to the cry, “Here, you fellows, help! help!” and I followed. We had instantaneous visions of a gold-medal from the Life-Saving Service, and glorious dreams of newspaper fame under the title “Journalistic Heroism,”—for my part, I must acknowledge I had also an unpleasant fancy that the drowning man might twine himself about me, and pull me to the bottom,—so I looked out carefully to see which way he was heading. But the beatific Gold-Medal fancies were brutally dissipated by the drowning man’s success in saving himself before we could reach him, and we remain as obscure as before.

Interlude

The proprietor has found what I have vainly been ransacking the world for—a civilized hat, showing the highest evolutional development of the hat as a practically useful article. I am going to make him an offer for it.

Alas! the time flies too fast. Soon all this will be a dream:—the white cottages shadowed with leafy green,—

the languid rocking-chairs upon the old-fashioned gallery,—the cows that look into one’s window with the rising sun,—the dog and the mule trotting down the flower-edged road,—the goose of the ancient Margot,—the muttering surf upon the bar beyond which the sharks are,—the bath-bell and the bathing belles,—the air that makes one feel like a boy,—the pleasure of sleeping with doors and windows open to the sea and its everlasting song,—the exhilaration of rising with the rim of the sun....

And then we must return to the dust and the roar of New Orleans, to hear the rumble of wagons instead of the rumble of breakers, and to smell the smell of ancient gutters instead of the sharp sweet scent of pure sea wind.

I believe I would rather be old Margot’s goose if I could. Blessed goose! thou knowest nothing about the literary side of the New Orleans Times-Democrat; but thou dost know that thou canst have a good tumble in the sea every day. If I could live down here I should certainly live to be a hundred years old. One lives here. In New Orleans one only exists.... And the boat comes—I must post this incongruous epistle.

Good-bye,—wish you were here, sincerely.

Very truly,

Lafcadio Hearn.

This jesting letter makes but little reference to the beauties of this tropical island, which had, however, made a profound impression upon Hearn, and later they were reproduced with astonishing fidelity in the book. Some distance to the westward of Grande Isle lies L’Isle Dernière, or—as it is now commonly called—Last Island, then a mere sandbank, awash in high tides, but thirty years before that an island of the same character as Grande Isle, and for half a century a popular summer resort for the people of New Orleans and the planters of the coast. On the 10th of August, 1856, a frightful storm swept it bare and annihilated the numerous summer visitors, only a handful among the hundreds escaping. The story of the tragedy remained a vivid tradition along the coast, where hardly a family escaped without the loss of some relation or friend, and on Hearn’s return to New Orleans he embodied a brief story of the famous storm, with his impressions of the splendours of the Gulf, under the title of “Torn Letters,” purporting to be the fragments of an old correspondence by one of the survivors. This story—published in the Times-Democrat—was so favourably received that he was later encouraged to enlarge it into a book, and the Harpers, who had already published some articles from his pen, issued it as a serial in their magazine, where it won instant recognition from a large public that had heretofore been ignorant of, or indifferent to, his work.

Oscar Wilde once declared that life and nature constantly plagiarized from art, and would have been pleased with the confirmation of his suggestion afforded by the fact that nearly twenty years after the publication of “Chita” a storm, similar to the one described in the book, swept away in its turn Grande Isle, and Les Chenières, and a girl child was rescued by Manila fishermen as Hearn had imagined. After living with one of their families for some time she was finally recovered by her father (who had believed her lost in the general catastrophe), under circumstances astoundingly like those invented by the author so many years before.

The book was dedicated to Dr. Rodolfo Matas, a Spanish physician in New Orleans, and an intimate friend,—frequently mentioned in the letters to Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia, with whom a correspondence was begun at about this time.

It was because of the success of “Chita” that Hearn was enabled to realize his long-nourished dream of penetrating farther into the tropics, and with a vague commission from the Harpers he left New Orleans, in 1887, and sailed for the Windward Islands. The journey took him as far south as British Guiana, the fruit of which was a series of travel-sketches printed in Harper’s Magazine. So infatuated with the Southern world of colour, light, and warmth had he become that—trusting to the possible profits of his books and the further material he hoped to gather—two months after his return from this journey, and without any definite resources, he cast himself back into the arms of the tropics, for which he suffered a life-long and unappeasable nostalgia.

It was to St. Pierre in the island of Martinique—the place that had most attracted him on his travels—that he returned. That island of “gigantic undulations,” that town of bright long narrow streets rising toward a far mass of glowing green ... which looks as if it had slid down the hill behind it, so strangely do the streets come tumbling to the port in a cascade of masonry,—with a red billowing of tiled roofs over all, and enormous palms poking up through it. That town with “a population fantastic, astonishing,—a population of the Arabian Nights ... many coloured, with a general dominant tint of yellow, like that of the town itself ... always relieved by the costume colours of Martinique—brilliant yellow stripings or chequerings which have an indescribable luminosity, a wonderful power of bringing out the fine warm tints of tropical flesh ... the hues of those rich costumes Nature gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,—her honey-lovers,—her insects: wasp-colours.” Here, under the shadow of Mt. Pelée “coiffed with purple and lilac cloud ... a magnificent Madras, yellow-banded by the sun,” he remained for two years, and from his experiences there created his next book. “Two Years in the French West Indies” made a minute and astonishing record of the town and the population, now as deeply buried and as utterly obliterated as was Pompeii by the lava and ashes of Vesuvius. Eighteen centuries hence, could some archæologist, disinterring the almost forgotten town, find this book, what passionate value would he give to this record of a community of as unique a character as that of the little Græco-Roman city! What price would be set to-day upon parchments which reproduced with such vivid fidelity the world, so long hid in darkness, of that civilization over whose calcined fragments we now yearningly ponder!

One English commentator upon the work of Lafcadio Hearn speaks of “Chita” and “Two Years in the French West Indies” with negligent contempt as of “the orchid and cockatoo type of literature,” and passes on to his Japanese work as the first of considerable importance. Other critics have been led into the same error, welcoming the cooler tones of his later pictures as a growth in power and a development of taste. It is safe to say that the makers of such criticisms have not seen the lands and peoples of whom these books attempt to reproduce the charm. Those who have known tropic countries will realize how difficult is the task of reproducing their multi-coloured glories, and that to bring even a faint shadow of their splendours back to eyes accustomed to the pale greys and half tints of Northern lands is a labour not only arduous in itself, but more than apt to be ungratefully received by those for whom it is undertaken. A mole would find a butterfly’s description of an August landscape exaggerated to the point of vulgarity, and the average critic is more likely to find satisfaction in “A Grey Day at Annisquam” than in the most subtly handled picture of the blaze of noon at Luxor.

“Chita” is marred occasionally by a phrase that suggests the journalism in which the hand of the writer had been so long submerged, but in “Two Years in the French West Indies” the artist has at last emancipated his talent and finished his long apprenticeship. Though the author himself in later years finds some fault with it, giving as excuse that much of it was done when he was physically exhausted by fever and anxiety, and “with but a half-filled stomach,” it remains one of his most admirable achievements.

The risks he had assumed in returning to the tropics proved greater than he had imagined. Publishers’ delays and rigid exactions of all their part of the writer’s pound of flesh left him at times entirely without means, and had it not been for the generosity and kindliness of the people of the now vanished city he would not have lived to return. It was some memory of humble friends there that is recorded in the sixth part of the autobiographical fragments, written after the disaster at St. Pierre.