TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1880.
Dear Krehbiel,—I was so glad to hear from you.
Your letter gave me much amusement. I wish I could have been present at that Chinese concert. It must have been the funniest thing of the kind ever heard of in Cincinnati.
It gives me malicious pleasure to inform you that my vile and improper book will probably be published in a few months. Also that the wickedest story of the lot—“King Candaule”—is being published as a serial in one of the New Orleans papers, with delightful results of shocking people. I will send you copies of them when complete.
I am interested in your study of Assyrian archæology. It is a pity there are so few good works on the subject. Layard’s unabridged works are very extensive; but I do not remember seeing them in the Cincinnati library. Rawlinson, I think, is more interesting in style and more thorough in research. The French are making fine explorations in this direction.
I find frequent reference made to Overbeck’s “Pompeii,” a German work, as containing valuable information on antique music, drawn from discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, also to Mazois, a great French writer upon the same subject. I have not seen them; but I fancy you would find some valuable information in them regarding musical instruments. I suppose you have read Sir William Gell’s “Pompeiana,”—at least the abridged form of it. You know the double flutes, etc., of the ancients are preserved in the museum of Naples. In the Cincinnati library is a splendid copy of the work on Egyptian antiquities prepared under Napoleon I, wherein you will find coloured prints—from photographs—of the musical instruments found in the catacombs and hypogæa. But I do not think there are many good books on the subject of Assyrian antiquities there. Vickers could put you in the way of getting better works on the subject than any one in the library, I believe.
You will master these things much more thoroughly than ever I shall—although I love them. I have only attempted, however, to photograph the rapports of the antiquities in my mind, like memories of a panoramic procession; while to you, the procession will not be one of shadows, but of splendid facts, with the sound of strangely ancient music and the harmonious tread of sacrificial bands,—all preserved for you through the night of ages. And the life of vanished cities and the pageantry of dead faiths will have a far more charming reality for you,—the Musician,—than ever for me,—the Dreamer.
I can’t see well enough yet to do much work. I have written an essay upon luxury and art in the time of Elagabalus; but now that I read it over again, I am not satisfied with it, and fear it will not be published. And by the way—I request, and beg, and entreat, and supplicate, and petition, and pray that you will not forget about Mephistopheles. Here, in the sweet perfume-laden air, and summer of undying flowers, I feel myself moved to write the musical romance whereof I spake unto you in the days that were.
I can’t say that things look very bright here otherwise. The prospect is dark as that of stormy summer night, with feverish pulses of lightning in the far sky-border,—the lightning signifying hopes and fantasies. But I shall stick to my pedestal of faith in literary possibilities like an Egyptian colossus with a broken nose, seated solemnly in the gloom of its own originality.
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava-flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archæologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio.
Once in a while I feel the spirit of restlessness upon me, when the Spanish ships come in from Costa Rica and the islands of the West Indies. I fancy that some day, I shall wander down to the levee, and creep on board, and sail away to God knows where. I am so hungry to see those quaint cities of the Conquistadores and to hear the sandalled sentinels crying through the night—Sereño alerto!—sereño alerto!—just as they did two hundred years ago.
I send you a little bit of prettiness I cut out of a paper. Ah!—that is style, is it not?—and fancy and strength and height and depth. It is just in the style of Richter’s “Titan.”
Major sends his compliments. I must go to see the Carnival nuisance. Remember me to anybody who cares about it, and believe me always
Faithfully yours,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1880.
My dear Krehbiel,—Pray remember that your ancestors were the very Goths and Vandals who destroyed the marvels of Greek art which even Roman ignorance and ferocity had spared; and I perceive by your last letter that you possess still traces of that Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.
You cannot make a Goth out of a Greek, nor can you change the blood in my veins by speaking to me of a something vague and gnostic and mystic which you deem superior to all that any Latin mind could conceive.
I grant the existence and the weird charm of the beauty that Gothic minds conceived; but I do not see less beauty in what was conceived by the passion and poetry of other races of mankind. This is a cosmopolitan art era: and you must not judge everything which claims art-merit by a Gothic standard.
Let me also tell you that you do not as yet know anything of the Spirit of Greek Art,—or the sources which inspired its miraculous compositions; and that to do so you would have to study the climate, the history, the ethnological record, the religion, the society of the country which produced it. My own knowledge is, I regret to say, very imperfect,—but it is sufficient to give me the right to tell you that you were wrong to accuse me of abandoning Greek ideals, or to lecture me upon what is and what is not art in matters of form and colour and literature. I might say the same thing in regard to your judgment of French writers: you confound Naturalism with Romanticism, and vice versa.
Again, do not suppose that I am insensible to other forms of beauty. You judge all art, I fear, by inductions from that in which you are a master; but the process in your case is false;—nor will you be able to judge the artistic soul of a people adequately by its musical productions, until you have passed another quarter of a century in the study of the music of different races and ages and civilizations. Then it is possible that you may find that secret key; but you cannot possibly do it now, learned as you are, nor do I believe there are a dozen men in the world who could do it.
Now I am with the Latin; I live in a Latin city;—I seldom hear the English tongue except when I enter the office for a few brief hours. I eat and drink and converse with members of the races you detest like the son of Odin that you are. I see beauty here all around me,—a strange, tropical, intoxicating beauty. I consider it my artistic duty to let myself be absorbed into this new life, and study its form and colour and passion. And my impressions I occasionally put into the form of the little fantastics which disgust you so much, because they are not of the Æsir and Jötunheim. Were I able to live in Norway, I should try also to intoxicate myself with the Spirit of the Land, and I might write of the Saga singers—
“From whose lips in music rolled
The Hamavel of Odin old,
With sounds mysterious as the roar
Of ocean on a storm-beat shore.”
The law of true art, even according to the Greek idea, is to seek beauty wherever it is to be found, and separate it from the dross of life as gold from ore. You do not see beauty in animal passion;—yet passion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the mother of language; and its gratification is the act of a creator, and the divinest rite of Nature’s temple.
... And writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties and follies and failures and successes,—even as I would write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem strange in words, appears very strange upon paper. And it may come to pass that I shall have stranger things to tell you; for this is a land of magical moons and of witches and of warlocks; and were I to tell you all that I have seen and heard in these years in this enchanted City of Dreams you would verily deem me mad rather than morbid.
Affectionately yours,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1880.
My dear Krehbiel,—Your letter delighted me. I always felt sure that you would unshackle yourself—sooner or later; but I hardly expected it would come so soon.
The great advantage of your new position, I think, will be the leisure it will afford you to study, and that too while you are still in the flush of youth and ambition, and before your energies are impaired by excess of newspaper drudgery. I think your future is secure now beyond any doubt;—for any man with such talent and knowledge, such real love for art, and such a total absence of vices should find the road before an easy one. It is true that you have a prodigious work to achieve; but the path is well oiled, like those level highways along which the Egyptians moved their colossi of granite. I congratulate you; I rejoice with you; and I envy you with the purest envy possible. Still more, however, I envy your youth, your strength, and that something which is partly hope and partly force and love for the beautiful which I have lost, and which, having passed away with the summer of life, can never be recalled. When a man commences to feel what it is to be young, he is beginning to grow old. You have not felt that yet. I hope you will not for many years. But I do; and my hair is turning grey at thirty!
I liked your letter very much also in regard to our discussion. It is just and pleasant to read. I thought your first reproaches much too violent. But I am still sure you are not correct in speaking of the Greeks as chaste. You will not learn what the Greeks were in the time of the glory of their republics either from Homer or Plato or Gladstone or Mahaffy. Perhaps the best English writer I could refer you to—without mentioning historians proper—is John Addington Symonds, author of "Studies of the Greek Poets,” and “Studies and Sketches in Southern Europe.” His works would charm you. The Greeks were brave, intelligent, men of genius, men who wrote miracles—un peuple des demi-dieux, as a French poet terms them; but the character of their thought, as reflected in their mythology, their literature, their art, and their history certainly does not indicate the least conception of chastity in the modern signification of the word. No: you will not go down to your grave with the conception you have made of them,—unless you should be determined not to investigate the contrary.
I would like to discuss the other affair, also; but I have so little time that I must forego the pleasure.
As to the fantastics, you greatly overestimate me if you think me capable of doing something much more “worthy of my talents,” as you express it. I am conscious they are only trivial; but I am condemned to move around in a sphere of triviality until the end. I am no longer able to study as I wish to, and, being able to work only a few hours a day, cannot do anything outside of my regular occupation. My hope is to perfect myself in Spanish and French; and, if possible, to study Italian next summer. With a knowledge of the Latin tongues, I may have a better chance hereafter. But I fancy the idea of the fantastics is artistic. They are my impressions of the strange life of New Orleans. They are dreams of a tropical city. There is one twin-idea running through them all—Love and Death. And these figures embody the story of life here, as it impresses me. I hope to be able to take a trip to Mexico in the summer just to obtain literary material, sun-paint, tropical colour, etc. There are tropical lilies which are venomous, but they are more beautiful than the frail and icy-white lilies of the North. Tell me if you received a fantastic founded upon the story of Ponce de Leon. I think I sent it since my last letter. I have not written any fantastics since except one,—inspired by Tennyson’s fancy,——
“My heart would hear her and beat
Had it lain for a century dead——
Would start and tremble under her feet——
And blossom in purple and red."
Jerry, Krehbiel, Ed Miller, Feldwisch! All gone! It is a little strange. But it will always be so. Looking around the table at home at which are gathered wanderers from all nations and all skies, the certainty of separation for all societies and coteries is very impressive. We are all friends. In six months probably there will not be one left. Dissolution of little societies in this city is more rapid than with you. In the tropics all things decay more speedily, or mummify. And I think that in such cities there is no real friendship. There is no time for it. Only passion for women, a brief acquaintance for men. And it is only when I meet some fair-haired Northern stranger here, rough and open like a wind from the great lakes, that I begin to realize I once lived in a city whose heart was not a cemetery two centuries old, and where people who hated did not kiss each other, and where men did not mock at all that youth and faith hold to be sacred.
Your sincere friend,
L. Hearn.
Read Bergerat’s article on Offenbach—the long one. I think you will like it.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1881.
My dear Krehbiel,—A pleasant manner, indeed, of breaking thy silence, vast and vague, illuminating my darkness of doubt!—the vision of a sunny-haired baby-girl, inheriting, I hope, those great soft grey eyes of yours, and the artist dream of her artist father. I should think you would feel a sweet and terrible responsibility—like one of those traditional guardian-angels entrusted for the first time with the care of a new life....
I have not much to tell you about myself. I am living in a ruined Creole house; damp brick walls green with age, zig-zag cracks running down the façade, a great yard with plants and cacti in it; a quixotic horse, four cats, two rabbits, three dogs, five geese, and a seraglio of hens,—all living together in harmony. A fortune-teller occupies the lower floor. She has a fantastic apartment kept dark all day, except for the light of two little tapers burning before two human skulls in one corner of the room. It is a very mysterious house indeed.... But I am growing very weary of the Creole quarter, and think I shall pull up stakes and fly to the garden district where the orange-trees are, but where Latin tongues are not spoken. It is very hard to accustom one’s self to live with Americans, however, after one has lived for three years among these strange types. I am swindled all the time and I know it, and still I find it hard to summon up resolution to forsake these antiquated streets for the commonplace and practical American districts....
Very affectionately,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1881.
My dear Krehbiel,—Your letter rises before me as I write like a tablet of white stone bearing a dead name. I see you standing beside me. I look into your eyes and press your hand and say nothing....
Remember me kindly to Mrs. Krehbiel. I am sure you will soon have made a cosy little home in the metropolis. In my last letter I forgot to acknowledge receipt of the musical articles, which do you the greatest credit, and which interested me much, although I know nothing about music further than a narrow theatrical experience and a natural sensibility to its simpler forms of beauty enable me to do. I see your name also in the programme of The Studio, and hope to see the first number of that periodical containing your opening article. I should like one of these days to talk with you about the possibility of contributing a romantic—not musical—series of little sketches upon the Creole songs and coloured Creoles of New Orleans to some New York periodical. Until the summer comes, however, it will be difficult for me to undertake such a thing; the days here are much shorter than they are in your northern latitudes, the weather has been gloomy as Tartarus, and my poor imagination cannot rise on dampened wings in this heavy and murky atmosphere. This has been a hideous winter,—incessant rain, sickening weight of foul air, and a sky grey as the face of Melancholy. The city is half under water. The lake and the bayous have burst their bonds, and the streets are Venetian canals. Boats are moving over the sidewalks, and moccasin snakes swarm in the old stonework of the gutters. Several children have been bitten.
I am very weary of New Orleans. The first delightful impression it produced has vanished. The city of my dreams, bathed in the gold of eternal summer, and perfumed with the amorous odours of orange flowers, has vanished like one of those phantom cities of Spanish America, swallowed up centuries ago by earthquakes, but reappearing at long intervals to deluded travellers. What remains is something horrible like the tombs here,—material and moral rottenness which no pen can do justice to. You must have read some of those mediæval legends in which an amorous youth finds the beautiful witch he has embraced all through the night crumble into a mass of calcined bones and ashes in the morning. Well, I feel like such a one, and almost regret that, unlike the victims of these diabolical illusions, I do not find my hair whitened and my limbs withered by sudden age; for I enjoy exuberant vitality and still seem to myself like one buried alive or left alone in some city cursed with desolation like that described by Sinbad the sailor. No literary circle here; no jovial coterie of journalists; no associates save those vampire ones of which the less said the better. And the thought—Where must all this end?—may be laughed off in the daytime, but always returns to haunt me like a ghost in the night.
Your friend,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1881.
My dear Krehbiel,—To what could I now devote myself? To nothing! To study art in any one of its branches with any hope of success requires years of patient study, vast reading, and a very considerable outlay of money. This I know. I also know that I could not write one little story of antique life really worthy of the subject without such hard study as I am no longer able to undertake, and a purchase of many costly works above my means. The world of Imagination is alone left open to me. It allows of a vagueness of expression which hides the absence of real knowledge and dispenses with the necessity of technical precision of detail. Again, let me tell you that to produce a really artistic work, after all the years of study required for such a task, one cannot possibly obtain any appreciation of the work for years after its publication. Such works as Flaubert’s “Salammbô” or Gautier’s “Roman de la Momie” were literary failures until recently. They were too learned to be appreciated. Yet to write on a really noble subject, how learned one must be! There is no purpose, as you justly observe, in my fantastics,—beyond the gratification of expressing a Thought which cries out within one’s heart for utterance, and the pleasant fancy that a few kindred minds will dream over them, as upon pellets of green hascheesch,—at least should they ever assume the shape I hope for. And do not talk to me of work, dear fellow, in this voluptuous climate. It is impossible! The people here are so languidly lazy that they do not even dream of chasing away the bats which haunt these crumbling buildings.
Is it possible you like Dr. Ebers? I hope not! He has no artistic sentiment whatever,—no feeling, no colour. He is dry and dusty as a mummy preserved with bitumen. He gropes in the hypogæa like some Yankee speculator looking for antiquities to sell. You must be Egyptian to write of Egypt;—you must feel all the weird solemnity and mighty ponderosity of the antique life;—you must comprehend the whole force of those ideas which expressed themselves in miracles of granite and mysteries of black marble. Ebers knows nothing of this. Turning from the French writers to his lifeless pages is like leaving the warm and perfumed bed of a beloved mistress for the slimy coldness of a sepulchre.
The Venus of Milo!—the Venus who is not a Venus! Perhaps you have read Victor Rydberg’s beautiful essay about that glorious figure! If not, read it; it is worth while. And let me say, my dear friend, no one dare write the whole truth about Greek sculpture. None would publish it. Few would understand it. Winckelmann, although impressed by it, hardly realized it. Symonds, in his exquisite studies, acknowledges that the spirit of the antique life remains, and will always remain to the greater number, an inexplicable although enchanting mystery. But if one dared!...
And you speak of the Song of Solomon. I love it more than ever. But Michelet, the passionate freethinker, the divine prose-poet, the bravest lover of the beautiful, has written a terrible chapter upon it. No lesser mind dare touch the subject now with sacrilegious hand.
I doubt if you are quite just to Gautier. I had hoped his fancy might please you. But Gautier did not write those lines I sent you. They are found in the report of conversations held with him by Emile Bergerat;—they are mere memories of a dead voice. Probably had he ever known that these romantic opinions would one day be published to the world, he would never have uttered them.
Your Hindoo legends charmed me, but I do not like them as I love the Greek legends. The fantasies created in India are superhumanly vast, wild, and terrible;—they are typhoons of the tropical imagination;—they seem pictures printed by madness,—they terrify and impress, but do not charm. I love better the sweet human story of Orpheus. It is a dream of human love,—the love that is not only strong, but stronger than death,—the love that breaks down the dim gates of the world of Shadows and bursts open the marble heart of the tomb to return at the outcry of passion. Yet I hold that the Greek mind was infantine in comparison to the Indian thought of the same era; nor could any Greek imagination have created the visions of the visionary East. The Greek was a pure naturalist, a lover of “the bloom of young flesh;”—the Hindoo had fathomed the deepest deeps of human thought before the Greek was born.
Zola is capable of some beautiful things. His “Le Bain” is pure Romanticism, delicate, sweet, coquettish. His contribution to “Les Soirées de Médan” is magnificent. His “Faute de l’Abbé Mouret” does not lack real touches of poetry. But as the copy of Nature is not true art according to the Greek law of beauty, so I believe that the school of Naturalism belongs to the low order of literary creation. It is a sharp photograph, coloured by hand with the minute lines of vein and shading of down. Zola’s pupils, however,—those who wrote the “Soirées de Médan,”—have improved upon his style, and have mingled Naturalism with Romanticism in a very charming way.
I was a little disappointed, although I was also much delighted, with parts of Cable’s “Grandissimes.” He did not follow out his first plan,—as he told me he was going to do,—viz., to scatter about fifty Creole songs through the work, with the music in the shape of notes at the end. There are only a few ditties published; and as the Creole music deals in fractions of tones, Mr. Cable failed to write it properly. He is not enough of a musician, I fancy, for that.
By the time you have read this I think you will also have read my articles on Gottschalk and translations. I sent for his life to Havana; and received it with a quaint Spanish letter from Enrique Barrera, begging me to find an agent for him. I found him one here. His West Indian volume is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever seen. It is the wildest of possible romances.
L. H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1881.
My dear Krehbiel,—How could you ever think you had offended me? I was so sick—expecting to go blind and “lift the cover of my brains,” as the Spaniards say, and also ill-treated—that I had no spirit left to write. You will be glad to know that I have now got so fat that they call me “The Fat Boy” at the office.
Your letter gave me great pleasure. I think your plan—vague as it appears to be—will crystallize into a very happy reality. You have the sacred fire,—le vrai feu sacré,—and with health and strength must succeed. What you want, and what we all want, who possess devotion to any noble idea, who hide any artistic idol in a niche of the heart, is that independence which gives us at least the time to worship the holiness of beauty,—be it in harmonies of sound, of form, or of colour. You have strength, youth,—not in years only but in the vital resources of your being,—the true parfum de la jeunesse is perceptible in your thoughts and hopes and abilities to create; and you have other advantages I will not mention lest my observations might be “embarrassing.” I should be surprised indeed to hear in a few years from now that you had not been able to emancipate yourself from the fetters of that intensely vulgar and detestably commonplace thing, called American journalism,—of which I, alas! must long remain a slave. A prize in the Havana lottery might alone deliver me speedily; but I mostly rely on the hope of being able next year to open a little French bookstore in one of the tense quaint old streets. I had hoped to leave New Orleans; but with my eyes in their present condition, it would be folly to fight for life over again in some foreign country.
You say you hope to see some day a product of my pen more durable than a newspaper article. But I very much doubt if you ever will. My visual misfortune has reduced my hours of work to one third. I only work from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. You will see, therefore, that my work must be rapid. At 2 P.M. my eyes are usually worn out. But as you seem to have been interested in some of my little fantasies, I take the liberty of sending you several now. They are too flimsy, however, to be ever collected for publication, unless in the course of a few years I could write a hundred or so, and select one out of three afterward.
Your observations about Amphion and Orpheus prompted me to send you an old issue of the Item, in which you will find some very extraordinary observations on the subject of Greek music, translated from a charming work in my possession. But you will be disgusted, perhaps, to know that with all his erudition upon musical legends and musical history, Gautier had no ear for music. I almost feel like asking you not to tell that to anybody.
If you could pay a visit this winter I think you would have a pleasant time. I would like to aid you to get some of the Creole music I vainly promised you. I found it impossible so far to obtain any; yet had I the ability to write music down I could have obtained you some. If you were here I could introduce you to the President of the Athénée Louisianaise, who would certainly put you in the way of doing so yourself.
What I do hope to obtain for you—if you care about it—is Mexican music. Mexicans are common visitors here; and every educated Mexican can sing and play some instrument. They have sung here for us,—guitar accompaniment. Did you ever hear “El Aguardiente”? It is a very queer air,—boisterous, merry with a merriment that seems all the time on the point of breaking into a laugh—yet withal half-savage like some Spanish ditties. When they sang it here, it was with a chorus accompaniment of glasses held upside down and tapped with spoons.
Did you ever hear negroes play the piano by ear? There are several curiosities here, Creole negroes. Sometimes we pay them a bottle of wine to come here and play for us. They use the piano exactly like a banjo. It is good banjo-playing, but no piano-playing.
One difficulty in the way of obtaining Creole music or ditties is the fact that the French coloured population are ashamed to speak their patois before whites. They will address you in French and sing French songs; but there must be extraordinary inducements to make them sing or talk in Creole. I have done it, but it is no easy work.
Nearly all the Creoles here—white—know English, French, and Spanish, more or less well, in addition to the patois employed only in speaking to children or servants. When a child becomes about ten years old, it is usually forbidden to speak Creole under any other circumstances.
But I do not suppose this will much interest you. I shall endeavour—this time I’m afraid to promise—to secure you some Mexican or Havanese music; and will postpone further remarks to a future occasion.
I am sorry Feldwisch is ill; and I doubt if the Colorado air will do him good. When he was here I had a vague suspicion I should never see him again.
Remember me to those whom you know I like, and don’t think me dilatory if I don’t write immediately on receipt of a letter. I have explained the condition of affairs as well as I could.
I remain, dear fellow, yours,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1882.
How are you on Russian music?
You could make a terrible and taking operatic tragedy on Sacher-Masoch’s “Mother of God.” Get it, if you can, and read it. I send you specimen translation. It was written, I believe, in German.
Have you read in the “Kalewala” of the “Bride of Gold,”—of the "Betrothed of Silver"?
Have you read how the mother of Kullevo arose from her tomb, and cried unto him from the deeps of the dust?
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1882.
Dear K.,—It got dark yesterday before I could finish some extracts from “Kalewala” I wanted to send. They are just suggestion. I must also tell you I have only a very confused idea of the “Kalewala” myself, having read it through simply as a romance, and never having had time to study out all its mythological bearings and meanings. In fact my edition is too incomplete and confusedly arranged in any case: notes are piled in a heap at the end of each volume, causing terrible trouble in making references. See if you can get Castrén.
I want also to tell you that the Pre-Islamic legends I spoke of to you are admirably arranged for musical suggestion. The original narrator breaks into verse here and there, as into song: Rabiah, for instance, recites his own death-song, his mother answers him in verse. All Arabian heroic stories are arranged in the same way; and even in so serious a work as Ibn Khallikan’s great biographical dictionary, almost every incident is emphasized by a poetical citation.
Your idea about your style being heavy is really incorrect. Your art has trained you so thoroughly in choosing words that hit the exact meaning desired with the full strength of technical or picturesque expression, that the continual use of certain beauties has dulled your perception of their native force, perhaps. You do not feel, I mean, the full strength of what you write—in a style of immense compressed force. I would not wish you to think you had done your best, though; better to feel dissatisfied, but not good to underestimate yourself. I am now, you see, claiming the privilege of criticizing what I could not begin to do myself; but I believe I can see beauty where it exists in style, and I don’t want you to be underestimating your own worth.
Are your letters of a character suitable for book-form? Hoppin,—I think, is the name,—the author of “Old England,” a Yale professor, who made an English tour, formed one of the most charming volumes in such a way. Think it over.
Affectionately,
Lafcadio.
Please never even suspect that my suggestions to you are made in any spirit of false conceit: a friend of the most limited artistic ability can often suggest things to a real artist, and even give him confidence.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1882.
KALEWALA
Dear K.,—The Society of Finnish Literature celebrated, in 1885, I think, the first centennial of the publication of the “Kalewala.”
There are two epics of Finland—just as most peoples have two epics—most people at least of Aryan origin; and the existence of such tremendous poems as the “Kalewala” and “Kanteletar” affords, in the opinion of M. Quatrefages, a strong proof that the Finns are of Aryan origin.
Loennrot was the Homer of Finland, the one who collected and edited the oral epic poetry now published under the head of the “Kalewala.”
But Léouzon Le Duc in 1845 published the first translation. (This I have.) Loennrot followed him three years later. Le Duc’s version contained only 12,100 verses. Loennrot’s contained 22,800. A second French version was subsequently made (which I have sent for). In 1853 appeared Castrén’s magnificent work on Finnish mythology, without which a thorough comprehension of the “Kalewala” is almost impossible.
You will be glad to know that the definitive edition of the "Kalewala,” as well as the work of Castrén, have both been translated into German by Herr Schiefner (1852-54, I believe is the date). Since then a whole ocean of Finnish poetry and folk-lore and legends has been collected, edited, published, and translated. (I get some of these facts from Mélusine, some from the work of the anthropologist Quatrefages.)
In order to get a correct idea of what you might do with the “Kalewala,” you must get it and read it. Try to get it in the German! I can give you some idea of its beauties; but to give you its movement, and plot, or to show you precisely how much operatic value it possesses, would be a task beyond my power. It would be like attempting to make one familiar with Homer in a week.
Once you have digested it, I can then be of real service, perhaps. You would need the work of Castrén also—which I cannot read. To determine the precise mythological value, rank, power, aspect, etc., of gods and demons, and their relation to natural forces, one must read up a little on the Finns. I have Le Duc, but he is deficient.
I don’t think that any epic surpasses that weirdest and strangest of runes. It is not so well known as it deserves. It gives you the impression of a work written by wizards, who spoke little to men, and much to nature—but the sinister and misty nature of the eternally frozen North.
You have in the “Kalewala” all the elements of a magnificent operatic episode,—weirdness, the passion of love, and the eternal struggle between evil and good, between darkness and light. You have any possible amount of melody,—a universe of inspiration for startling and totally novel musical themes. The scenery of such a thing might be made wilder and grander than anything imagined even by the Talmudically vast conceptions of Wagner.
An opera founded on the “Kalewala” might be made a work worthy of the grandest musician who ever lived: think of the possibilities suggested by the picture of Nature’s mightiest forces in contention,—wind and sea, frost and sun, darkness and luminosity.
I don’t like the antique theme you suggest, because it has been worn so threadbare that only a miracle could give it a fresh surface. Better search the “Kathā-sarit-Sāgara,” or some other Indian collection,—or borrow from the sublimely rough and rugged poetry of Pre-Islamic Arabia. You will never regret an acquaintance with these books—even at some cost. They epitomize all the thought, passion, and poetry of a nation and of a period.
I prefer the “Kalewala” to any other theme you suggest. I might suggest many others, but none so vast, so grand, so multiform. Nothing in the Talmud like that. The Talmud is a Semitic work; but nothing Jewish rises to the grandeur of Arabic poetry, which expresses the supreme possibilities of the Semitic mind,—except, perhaps, the Book of Job, which is thought by some to have had an Arabian creator.
What you say about the disinclination to work for years upon a theme for pure love’s sake, without hope of reward, touches me,—because I have felt that despair so long and so often. And yet I believe that all the world’s art-work—all that which is eternal—was thus wrought. And I also believe that no work made perfect for the pure love of art, can perish, save by strange and rare accident. Despite the rage of religion and of time, we know Sappho found no rival, no equal. Rivers changed their courses and dried up,—seas became deserts, since some Egyptian romanticist wrote the story of Latin-Khamois. Do you suppose he ever received $00 for it?
Yet the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this sacrifice to art,—this trampling of self under foot! It is the supreme test for admittance into the ranks of the eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless sacrifice which the artist’s soul is bound to make,—as in certain antique cities maidens were compelled to give their virginity to a god of stone! But without the sacrifice can we hope for the grace of heaven?
What is the reward? The consciousness of inspiration only! I think art gives a new faith. I think—all jesting aside—that could I create something I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal purpose; and I should know the pride of the prophet that had seen God face to face.
All this might seem absurd, perhaps, to a purely practical mind (yours is not too practical); but there is a practical side also. In this age of lightning, thought and recognition have become quadruple-winged, like the angels of Isaiah. Do your very best,—your very, very best: the century must recognize the artist if he is there. If he is not recognized, it is because he is not great. Have you faith in yourself? I know you are a great natural artist; I have absolute faith in you. You must succeed if you make the sacrifice of working for art’s sake alone.
Comparing yourself to me won’t do!—dear old fellow. I am in most things a botch! You say you envy me certain qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an art whose beauty is geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical. You also say you envy me my power of application!—If you only knew the pain and labour I have to create a little good work. And there are months when I cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the thought will not always come—there are weeks when I cannot even think.
The only application I have is that of persistence in a small way. I write a rough sketch and labour it over and over again for half a year, at intervals of ten minutes’ leisure—sometimes I get a day or two. The work done each time is small. But with the passing of the seasons the mass becomes noticeable—perhaps creditable. This is merely the result of system.
You may laugh at this letter if you please,—this friendly protest to one whom I have always recognized as my superior,—but there is truth in it. Think over the “Kalewala,” and write to
Your friend and admirer,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1882.
My dear Krehbiel,—When I got your letter I felt as if a great load was lifted off me—the sky looked brighter and the world seemed a little sweeter than usual. As for me, you could have paid me no higher compliment. Glad you did not disapprove of the article.
Your clippings are superb. I think your style constantly gains in force and terseness. It is admirably crystallized; and I have not yet been able to form a permanent style of my own. I trust I will succeed in time; but in purity and conciseness you will always be my master, for your art has taught you style better than a thousand university professors could do. I suppose, however, you will always be slightly Gothic,—not harshly Gothic, but Middle Period,—making ornament always subordinate to the general plan. I shall always be more or less Arabesque,—covering my whole edifice with intricate designs, serrating my arches, and engraving mysticisms above the portals. You will be grand and lofty; I shall try to be at once voluptuous and elegant, like a colonnade in the mosque of Cordova.
I send you something your article on the Jubilee Singers makes me think of. It is from the pen of a marvellous writer, who long lived at Senegal. If you do not find anything new in it, return it; but if it can be of use to you, keep it. I hope to translate the whole work some day.
Your friend,
L. H.
Have heard Patti; but did not understand her power until you explained it me.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1882.
My dear Krehbiel,—Much as it pleased me to hear from you, I assure you that your letter is shocking. It is shocking to hear of anybody being compelled to work for seventeen hours a day. You have neither time to think, to study, to read, to do your best work, or to make any artistic progress—not even to hint of pleasure—while working seventeen hours a day. Nor is that all; I believe it injures a man’s health and capacity for endurance, as well as his style and peace of mind. You have a fine constitution; but if once broken down by over-straining the nervous system you will never get fully over the shock. It is very hard for me to believe that it is really necessary for you to do reportorial work and to write correspondence, unless you have a special financial object to accomplish within a very short space of time. The editorial work touching upon art matters which you are capable of doing for the Tribune might be done in the daytime; but what do you want to waste your brain and time upon reportorial work for? D—n reportorial work and correspondence, and the American disposition to work people to death, and the American delight in getting worked to death! Well, I have nothing more to say except to protest my hope that the seventeen-hours-a-day business is going to stop before long; for the longer it lasts the more difficult it will be for you to accomplish your ultimate purpose. The devil of overworking one’s self is that it renders it impossible to get fair and just remuneration for value given,—impossible also to create those opportunities for self-advancements which form the steps of the stairway to the artistic heaven,—impossible to maintain that self-pride and confident sense of worth without which no man, however gifted, can make others fully conscious of it. When you voluntarily convert yourself into a part of the machinery of a great daily newspaper, you must revolve and keep revolving with the wheels; you play the man in the treadmill. The more you involve yourself the more difficult it will be for you to escape. I said I had nothing further to observe; but I find I must say something more,—not that I imagine for a moment I am telling you anything new, but because I wish to try to impress anew upon you some facts which do not seem to have influenced you as I believe they ought to do.
Under all the levity of Henri Murger’s picturesque Bohemianism, there is a serious philosophy apparent which elevates the characters of his romance to heroism. They followed one principle faithfully,—so faithfully that only the strong survived the ordeal,—never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocation for any other occupation however lucrative,—not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshippers. The conditions pictured by Murger have passed away in Paris as elsewhere: the old barriers to ambition have been greatly broken down. But I think the moral remains. So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labours at aught that is not of art, he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.
Do you never reflect that within a few years you will no longer be the YOUNG MAN,—and that, like Vesta’s fires, the enthusiasm of youth for an art-idea must be well fed with the sacred branches to keep it from dying out? I think you ought really to devote all your time and energies and ability to the cultivation of one subject, so as to make that subject alone repay you for all your pains. And I do not believe that Art is altogether ungrateful in these days: she will repay fidelity to her, and recompense sacrifices. I don’t think you have any more right to play reporter than a great sculptor to model fifty-cent plaster figures of idiotic saints for Catholic processions, or certain painters to letter steamboats at so much a letter. In one sense, too, Art is exacting. To acquire real eminence in any one branch of any art, one must study nothing else for a lifetime. A very wide general knowledge may be acquired only at the expense of depth. But you are certainly right in thinking of the present for other reasons. Still, there is nothing so important, not only to success but to confidence, hope, and happiness, as good health and a strong constitution; and these you must lose if you choose to keep working seventeen hours a day! It is well to be able to do such a thing on a brief stretch, but it is suicide, moral and physical, to keep it up regularly. The rolling-mill hand, or the puddler, or the moulder, or the common brakeman on a railroad cannot keep up at such hours for a great length of time; and you must know that even hard labour is not so exhausting as brain-work. Don’t work yourself sick, old friend,—you are in a fair way to do it now.
Your friend,
L. H.
TO JEROME A. HART
New Orleans, May, 1882.
Dear Sir,—Thanks for your kindly little article. I suppose it emanated from the same source as the charming translation of Gautier’s “Spectre de la Rose”—which we reproduced here, comparing it with the inferior translation—or rather mutilation—of the same poem which appeared in the ——.
Your translation of the epitaph seems to me superb as far as the first two lines go; but I can hardly agree with you as to the last. “La plus belle du monde” cannot be perfectly rendered by “the loveliest in the land”—which is a far weaker expression, by reason of the circumscribed idea it involves. “La plus belle du monde” is an expression of paramount force, simple as it is; it conveys the idea of beauty without an equal, not in any one country, but in the whole world. But I think your second line is a masterpiece of faithfulness; and, as you justly remark, my hobby is literalism.
Very sincerely yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO JEROME A. HART
New Orleans, May, 1882.
Dear Sir,—I am very grateful for your kind letter and the pleasure of making your acquaintance even through an epistolary medium.
We have the same terrible proverb in Spanish that you cite in Italian; but it certainly can never apply to the Argonaut’s exquisite translations—preserving metre, colour, and warmth so far as seems to be possible. Still, I must say that I do not believe the poetry of one country can be perfectly reproduced in corresponding metre in the poetry of another: much that is even marvellous may be done,—yet a little of the original perfume evaporates in the process. Therefore the French gave prose translations of Heine and Byron: especially in regard to the German poet they considered translation in metrical form impossible. Nevertheless it is impossible also to refrain from attempting such things at times,—when the beauty of exotic verse seems to take us by the throat with the strangulation of pleasure. I have felt impelled occasionally to make an essay in poetical translation; the result has generally been a dismal failure, but I venture to send you a specimen which appears to be less condemnable than most of my efforts. I cannot presume to call it a translation,—it is only an adaptation.
As for the lines in “Clarimonde,” if the book ever reaches a second edition, I think I will be able to remedy some of their imperfections. Skaldic verse, I suppose, would be anachronistically vile; but something corresponding to the metre of “La Chanson de Roland,” unrhymed, what the French call vers assonances. This corresponds exactly with your lines in breadth; also in tone, as the accent of the assonance is thrown upon the last syllable of each line
Very gratefully yours,
L. H.
P. S. Just received another note from you. Have seen the reproduction; I am exceedingly thankful for the compliment; and you know that so far as the copyright business is concerned, the credit must do the book too much good for Worthington to find any fault. I suppose you receive the Times-Democrat of New Orleans. I forward last Sunday’s issue, containing a little compliment to the Argonaut.
Very sincerely yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO JEROME A. HART
New Orleans, December, 1882.
Dear Sir,—I venture to intrude upon you to ask a little advice, which as a brother-student of foreign literature you could probably give me better than any other person to whom I could apply. I am informed that in San Francisco there are enterprising and liberal-minded publishers, with whom unknown authors have a better chance than with the austere and pious publishers of the East. It would be a very great favour indeed, if you could give me some positive indication in this matter. I desire to find a publisher for that excessively curious but somewhat audacious book, “La Tentation de Saint Antoine,” of Flaubert, of which I have completed and corrected the MS. translation. You who know the original will probably agree with me that it would be little less than a literary crime to emasculate such a masterpiece in the translation. I have translated almost every word of the Heresiarch dispute, and the soliloquy of the god Crepitus, etc.
Consequently I have very little hopes of obtaining a publisher in New York or Boston. Do you think I could obtain one in San Francisco? I would be willing to advance something toward the cost of publishing,—if necessary.
Trust you will pardon my intrusion. I think the mutual interest we both feel in one branch of foreign literature is a fair excuse for my letter.
With thanks for previous many kindnesses,
I remain, truly yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO JEROME A. HART
New Orleans, January, 1883.
Dear Sir,—Writing to San Francisco seems, after a sort, like writing to Japan or Malabar, so great is the lapse of time consumed in the transit of mail-matter, especially when one is anxious. I was quite so, fearing you might have considered my letter intrusive; but your exceedingly pleasant reply has dispelled all apprehension.
I am not surprised at the information; for the difficulty of finding publishers in the United States is something colossal, and my hopes burned with a very dim flame. I do not know about Worthington,—as he is absent in Europe, perhaps he will undertake the publication; but I fear, inasmuch as he is a Methodist of the antique type, that he will not. Now the holy Observer declared that the “Cleopatra” was a collection of “stories of unbridled lust without the apology of natural passion;” that "the translation reeked with the miasma of the brothel,” etc., etc.,—and Worthington was much exercised thereat. Otherwise I should have suggested the publication in English of “Mademoiselle de Maupin.”
I regret that I cannot tell you anything about the fate of “Cleopatra’s Nights,” but the publisher preserves a peculiar and sinister silence in regard to it. Perhaps he is sitting upon the stool of orthodox repentance. Perhaps he is preparing to be generous. But this I much doubt; and as the translations were published partly at my own expense, I am anxious only regarding the fate of my original capital.
Yes, I read the Critic—and considered that the observation on Gautier stultified the paper. If the translator had been dissected by the same hand, I should not have felt very unhappy. But I received some very nice private letters from Eastern readers, which encouraged me very much, and among them several requesting for other translations from Gautier.
“Salammbô" is the greatest, by far, of Flaubert’s creations, because harmonious in all its plan and purpose, and because it introduces the reader into an unfamiliar field of history, cultivated with astonishing skill and verisimilitude. It was twice written, like “La Tentation.” I translated the prayer to the Moon for the preface to “La Tentation.” I sincerely trust you will translate it. As for time, it is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man cannot spare an hour a day, he can certainly spare a half-hour. I translated “La Tentation” by this method,—never allowing a day to pass without an attempt to translate a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed. That serpent-scene, the crucified lions, the breaking of the chair of gold, the hideous battles about Carthage,—these pages contain pictures that ought not to remain entombed in a foreign museum. I pray you may translate “Salammbô,”—a most difficult task, I fancy,—but one that you would certainly succeed admirably with. In my preface I spoke of “Salammbô” as the most wonderful of Flaubert’s productions.
“Herodias" is another story which ought to be translated. But I would write too long a letter if I dilate upon the French masterpieces.
I will only say that, in regard to recent publications, I have noticed some extraordinary novels which have not earned the attention they deserve. “Le Roman d’un Spahi” seems to me a miracle of art,—and “Le Mariage de Loti” contains passages of wonderful and weird beauty. These, with “Aziyadé,” are the productions of a French naval officer who signs himself Loti. Think I shall try to translate the first-named next year.
Verily the path of the translator is hard. The Petersons and Estes & Lauriat are deluging the country with bogus translations or translations so unfaithful to the original that they must be characterized as fraudulent. And the great American public like the stuff. 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 desecration by less reverent bards. But this is worth working for.
With grateful thanks, and sincere hopes that you will not be deterred from translating “Salammbô” before some incompetent hand attempts it, I remain,
Sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1882.
Dear Sir,—I am very grateful for the warm and kindly sympathy your letter evidences; and as I have already received about a half-dozen communications of similar tenor from unknown friends, I am beginning to feel considerably encouraged. The “lovers of the antique loveliness” 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 Northern tongues. This no man can hope to accomplish; but even a translator may carry his stone to the master-masons of a new architecture of language.
You ask me about translations. I am sorry that I am not able to answer you hopefully. I have a curious work by Flaubert in the hands of R. Worthington (under consideration); and I have various MSS. filed away in the Cemetery of the Rejected. I tried for six years to obtain a publisher for the little collection you so much like, and was obliged at last to have them published partly at my own expense—a difficult matter for one who is obliged to work upon a salary. As for “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” much as I should desire the honour of translating it, I would dread to work in vain, or at best to work for the profit of some publisher who would have the translator at his mercy. If I could find a publisher willing to publish the work precisely as I would render it, I would be glad to surrender all profits to him; but I fancy that any American publisher would wish to emasculate the manuscript.
I am told that an English translation was in existence in London some years ago, but I could not learn the publisher’s name. Chatto & Windus, the printers of the admirable English version of the “Contes Drolatiques,” might be able to inform you further. But I am afraid that the English version was scarcely worthy of the original, owing to the profound silence of the press in regard to the matter. An American translation was being offered to New York publishers a few years ago. It was not accepted.
Although my own work is far from being perfect, I think I am capable of judging other translations of Gautier. The American translations are very poor (“Spirite,” “Captain Fracasse,” “Romance of the Mummy”), in fact they are hardly deserving the name. The English translations of Gautier’s works of travel are generally good. Henry Holt has reprinted some of them, I think.
But out of perhaps sixty volumes, Gautier’s works include very few romances or stories. I have never seen a translation of “Fortunio” or "Militona,”—perhaps because the sexual idea—the Eternal Feminine—prevails too much therein. “Avatar” has been translated in the New York Evening Post, I cannot say how well; but I have the manuscript translation of it myself, which I could never get a publisher to accept. Then there are the “Contes Humoristiques” (1 vol.) and about a dozen short tales not translated. Besides these, and the four translated already (“Fracasse,” “Spirite,” “The Mummy,” and possibly "Mademoiselle de Maupin”) Gautier’s works consist chiefly of critiques, sketches of travel, dramas, comedies—including the charmingly wicked piece, “A Devil’s Tear,”—and three volumes of poems.
My purpose now is to translate a series of works by the most striking French authors, each embodying a style of a school. I tried in the first collection to offer the best novelettes of Gautier in English, relying upon my own judgement so far as I could. Hereafter with leisure and health I shall attempt to do the same for about five others. I can understand your desire to see more of Gautier, and I trust you will some day; but when you have read “Mademoiselle de Maupin” and the two volumes of short stories, you have read his masterpieces of prose, and will care less for the remainder. His greatest art is of course in his magical poems; except the exotic poetry of the Hindoos, and of Persia, there is nothing in verse to equal them.
I must have fatigued your patience, however, by this time. With many thanks for your kind letter, which I took the liberty to send to Worthington, and hoping that you will soon be able to see another curious attempt of mine in print, I remain,
Sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
I forgot to say that in point of archæologic art the “Roman de la Momie” is Gautier’s greatest work. It towers like an obelisk among the rest. But the American translation would disappoint you very much; it is a poor concern all the way through. It would not be a bad idea to drop a line to Chatto & Windus, Pub., London, and enquire about English versions of Gautier. You know that Austin Dobson translated some of his poems very successfully indeed.
In haste,
L. H.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, November, 1882.
Dear Sir,—I translate hurriedly for you a few extracts from "Mademoiselle de Maupin,” some of which have been used or translated by Mallock, who has said many very clever things, but whose final conclusions appear to me to smack of Jesuitic casuistry.
Gautier was not the founder of a philosophic school, but the founder of a system of artistic thought and expression. His “Mademoiselle de Maupin” is an idyl, nothing more, an idyl in which all the vague longings of youth in the blossoming of puberty, the reveries of amorous youth, the wild dreams of two passionate minds, male and female, both highly cultivated, are depicted with a daring excused only by their beauty. I think Mallock wrong in his taking Gautier for a type of Antichrist. There are few who have beheld the witchery of an antique statue, the supple interlacing of nude limbs in frieze or cameo, who have not for the moment regretted the antique. Freethinkers as were Gautier, Hugo, Baudelaire, De Musset, De Nerval, none of them were insensible to the mighty religious art of mediævalism which created those fantastic and enormous fabrics in which the visitor feels like an ant crawling in the skeleton of a mastodon. With the growth of æstheticism there is a tendency to return to antique ideas of beauty, and the last few years has given evidence of a resurrection of Greek influence in several departments of art. But when the first revolution against prudery and prejudice had to be made in France, violent and extreme opinions were necessary,—the Gautiers and De Mussets were the Red Republicans of the Romantic Renaissance. Gautier’s poems utter the same plaints as his prose; mourning for the death of Pan, crying that the modern world is draped with funeral hangings of black, against which the white skeleton appears in relief. But the dreams of an artist may influence art and literature only; they cannot affect the crystallization of social systems or the philosophy of the eye.
They were all pantheists, these characters of Romanticism, some vaguely like old Greek dreamers, others deeply and studiously, like De Nerval, a lover of German mysticism: nature, whom they loved, must have whispered to them in wind-rustling and wave-lapping some word of the mighty truths she had long before taught to Brahmins and to Bodhisatvas under a more luxuriant sky. They saw the evil beneath their feet as a vast “paste” for which the great Statuary eternally moulded new forms in his infinite crucible, and into which old forms were remelted to reappear in varied shapes;—the lips of loveliness might blossom again in pouting roses, the light of eyes rekindle in amethyst and emerald, the white breast with its delicate network of veins be re-created in fairest marble. The worship within sombre churches, and chapels, seemed to them unworthy of the spirit of Universal Love;—to adore him they deemed no temple worthy save that from whose roof of eternal azure hang the everlasting lamps of the stars; no music, save that never-ending ocean hymn, ancient as the moon, whose words no human musician may learn.
I do not know whether Mallock translated Gautier himself, or made extracts; but Gautier’s madrigal pantheistic alone contains the germ of a faith sweeter and purer and nobler than the author of “Is Life Worth Living?” ever dreamed of, or at least comprehended. The poem is a microcosm of artistic pantheism; it contains the whole soul of Gautier, like one of the legendary jewels in which spirits were imprisoned.
Speaking of the “Decameron,” Petronius, Angelinus, and so forth, I must say that I think it the duty of every scholar to read them. It is only thus that we can really obtain a correct idea of the thought and lives of those who read them when first related or written. They are historical paintings, they are shadows of the past and echoes of dead voices. Brantôme or De Châteauneuf teach one more about the life of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries than a dozen ordinary historians could do. The influence of sex and sexual ideas has moulded the history of nations and formed national character; yet, except Michelet, there is perhaps no historian who has read history fairly in this connection. Without such influence there can be no real greatness; the mind remains arid and desolate. Every noble mind is made fruitful by its virility; we all have a secret museum in some corner of the brain, although our Pompeian or Etruscan curiosities are only shown to appreciative friends.
I have read your enclosed slip and am quite pleased with the creditable notice given you by way of introduction, and quite astonished that you should be so young. You have fine prospects before you, I fancy, if so successful already. Of course Congregational is so vague a word that I cannot tell how latitudinarian your present ideas are (for people in general), nor how broadly you may extend your studies of philosophy. Your correspondence with a freethinker of an extreme type would incline me to believe you were very liberally inclined, but I have often noticed that clergymen belonging even to the old cast-iron type may be classed among warm admirers of the beautiful and the true for their own sakes
Very sincerely yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S. Have just been looking at Mallock, and am satisfied that he made the translation himself because he translated the “virginity” by “purity.” No one but a Catholic or Jesuit would do that; only Catholics, I believe, consider the consummation of love intrinsically impure, or attempt to identify purity with virginity. Gautier would never have used the word—a word in itself impure and testifying to uncleanliness of fancy. I have translated it properly by the English equivalent. I suppose you know that Mallock’s aim is to prove that everybody not a Catholic is a fool.
ENCLOSURE
“Mademoiselle de Maupin,” petite édition, Charpentier, 2 vols.; vol. ii, page 12.
“I am a man of the Homeric ages;—the world in which I live is not mine, and I comprehend nothing of the social system by which I am surrounded. Never did Christ come into the world for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. Never have I been to Golgotha to gather passion-flowers; and the deep river flowing from the side of the crucified, and making a crimson girdle about the world, has never bathed me with its waves.”
Page 21: “Venus may be seen; she hides nothing; for modesty is created for the ugly alone; and is a modern invention, daughter of the Christian disdain of form and matter.”
“O ancient worlds! all thou didst revere is now despised; thine idols are overthrown in dust; gaunt anchorites clad in tattered rags, gory martyrs with shoulders lacerated by the tigers of the circuses, lie heaped upon the pedestals of thy gods so comely and so charming;—the Christ has enveloped the world in his winding sheet. Beauty must blush for herself, must wear a shroud.”
Pages 22, 23: “Virginity, thou bitter plant, born upon a soil blood-moistened, whose wan and sickly flower opes painfully within the damp shadows of the cloister, under cold lustral rains;—rose without perfume, and bristling with thorns,—thou hast replaced for us those fair and joyous roses, besprinkled with nard and Falernian, worn by the dancing girls of Sybaris.”
“The antique world knew thee not, O fruitless flower!—never wert thou entwined within their garlands, replete with intoxicating perfume;—in that vigorous and healthy life, thou wouldst have been disdainfully trampled under foot! Virginity, mysticism, melancholy,—three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by the Christ. Pale spectres who deluge the world with icy tears and who,” etc., etc.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1883.
SECRET AFFINITIES
(A Pantheistic Madrigal)
“Emaux et Camées—Enamels and Cameos”
For three thousand years two blocks of marble in the pediment of an antique temple have juxtaposed their white dreams against the background of the Attic heaven.
Congealed in the same nacre, tears of those waves which weep for Venus,—two pearls deep-plunged in ocean’s gulf, have uttered secret words unto each other;—
Blooming in the cool Generalife, beneath the spray of the ever-weeping fountain, two roses in Boabdil’s time spake to each other with whisper of leaves;—
Upon the cupolas of Venice, two white doves, rosy-footed, perched one May-time evening on the nest where love makes itself eternal.
Marble, pearl, rose, and dove—all dissolve, all pass away;—the pearl melts, the marble falls, the rose fades, the bird takes flight.
Leaving each other, all atoms seek the deep Crucible to thicken that universal paste formed of the forms that are melted by God.
By slow metamorphoses, the white marble changes to white flesh, the rosy flowers into rosy lips,—remoulding themselves into many fair bodies.
Again do the white doves coo within the hearts of young lovers; and the rare pearls re-form into teeth for the jewel-casket of woman’s smile.
And hence those sympathies, imperiously sweet, whereby in all places souls are gently warmed to know each other for sisters.
Thus, docile to the summons of an aroma, a sunbeam, a colour, the atom flies to the atom as to the flower the bee.
Then dream-memories return of long reveries in white temple pediments, of reveries in the deeps of the sea,—of blossom talk beside the clear-watered fountain,—
Of kisses and quivering of wings upon the domes that are tipped with balls of gold; and the faithful molecules seek one another and know the clinging of love once more.
Again love awakens from its slumber of oblivion;—vaguely the Past is re-born; the perfume of the flower inhales and knows itself again in the sweetness of the pink mouth.
In that mother-of-pearl which glimmers in a laugh, the pearl recognizes its own whiteness;—upon the smooth skin of a young girl the marble with emotion recognizes its own coolness.
The dove finds in a sweet voice the echo of its own plaint,—resistance becomes blunted, and the stranger becomes the lover.
And thou before whom I tremble and burn,—what ocean-billow, what temple-font, what rose-tree, what dome of old knew us together? What pearl or marble, what flower or dove?
L. Hearn.
Dear Ball,—Hope you will like the above rough prose version—of course all the unison is gone, all the soul of it has exhaled like a perfume;—this is a faded flower, pressed between the leaves of a book,—not the exquisite blossom which grew from the heart of Théophile Gautier.
L. H.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1883.
Dear Ball,—So far from your last being a “poor letter,” as you call it, I derived uncommon pleasure therefrom; and you must not annoy yourself by writing me long letters when you have much more important matters to occupy yourself. To write a letter of twelve pages or more is the labour equivalent to the production of a column article for a newspaper; and it would be unreasonable to expect any correspondent to devote so much time and labour to letter-writing more than once in several months. I have always found the friends who write me short letters write me regularly, and all who write long letters become finally weary and cease corresponding altogether at last. Nevertheless a great deal may be said in a few words, and much pleasure extracted from a letter one page long.
I should much like to hear of your being called to a strong church, but I suppose, as you say, that your youth is for the time being a drawback. But I certainly would not feel in the least annoyed upon that score. You have all your future before you in a very bright glow, and I do not believe that any one can expect to obtain real success before he is thirty-five or forty. You cannot even forge yourself a good literary style before thirty; and even then it will not be perfectly tempered for some years. But from what I have seen of your ability, I should anticipate a more than common success for you, and I believe you will create yourself a very wide and strong weapon of speech. And your position is very enviable. There is no calling which allows of so much leisure for study and so many opportunities for self-cultivation. Just fancy the vast amount of reading you will be able to accomplish within five years, and the immense value of such literary absorption. I have the misfortune to be a journalist, and it is hard work to study at all, and attend to one’s diurnal duty. Another misfortune here is the want of a good library. You have in Boston one of the finest in the world, and I believe you will be apt to regret it if you leave. Speaking of study,—you know that science has broadened and deepened so enormously of late years, that no man can thoroughly master any one branch of any one science, without devoting his whole life thereunto. The scholars of the twentieth century will have to be specialists or nothing. In matters of literary study, pure and simple, a fixed purpose and plan must be adopted. I will tell you what mine is, for I am quite young too, comparatively speaking, and have my “future” before me, so to speak. I never read a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination; but whatever contains novel, curious, potent imagery I always read, no matter what the subject. When the soil of fancy is really well enriched with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow spontaneously. There are four things especially which enrich fancy,—mythology, history, romance, poetry,—the last being really the crystallization of all human desire after the impossible, the diamonds created by prodigious pressure of suffering. Now there is very little really good poetry, so it is easy to choose. In history I think one should only seek the extraordinary, the monstrous, the terrible; in mythology the most fantastic and sensuous, just as in romance. But there is one more absolutely essential study in the formation of a strong style—science. No romance equals it. If one can store up in his brain the most extraordinary facts of astronomy, geology, ethnology, etc., they furnish him with a wonderful and startling variety of images, symbols, and illustrations. With these studies I should think one could not help forging a good style at least—an impressive one certainly. I give myself five years more study; then I think I may be able to do something. But with your opportunities I could hope to do much better than I am doing now. Opportunity to study is supreme happiness; for colleges and universities only give us the keys with which to unlock libraries of knowledge hereafter. Isn’t it horrible to hold the keys in one’s hands and never have time to use them?
Very truly yours,
L. Hearn.
Don’t write again until you have plenty of time;—I know you must be busy. But whenever you would like to hear anything about anything in my special line of study, let me have a line from you, as I might be able to be of some use in matters of reference.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1883.
My dear Ball,—I suppose you are quite disgusted with my silence; but you would excuse it were you to see how busy I have been, especially since our managing editor has gone on a vacation of some months.
I was amused at your ideal description of me. As you supposed, I am swarthy—more than the picture indicates; but by no means interesting to look at, and the profile view conceals the loss of an eye. I am also very short, a small square-set fellow of about 140 pounds when in good health.
I read with extreme pleasure your essay, and while I do not hold the same views, I believe yours will do good. Furthermore, if you familiarize the public with Buddhism, you are bound to aid in bringing about the very state of things I hope for. Buddhism only needs to be known to make its influence felt in America. I don’t think that works like those of Sinnett, or Olcott’s curious “Buddhist Catechism,” published by Estes & Lauriat, will do any good;—they are too metaphysical, representing a sort of neo-gnosticism which repels by its resemblance to Spiritualistic humbug. But the higher Buddhism,—that suggested by men like Emerson, John Weiss, etc.,—will yet have an apostle. We shall live, I think, to see some strange things.
I am sorry I cannot gratify you by my reply about your projected literary sketches. The policy of the paper has been to give the preference to lady writers on such subjects, with a few exceptions to which some literary reputation has been attached. You would have a much better chance with theosophic essays; but you would be greatly restricted as to space. You did not write, it appears, to Page; and he is now at Saratoga, where he will remain about two months. Anyhow, I would personally advise you—if you think my advice worth anything—to devote your literary impulse altogether to religious subjects. By a certain class of sermons and addresses you can achieve in a few years much more success than the slow uphill work of professional journalism or literature would bring you in a whole decade. With leisure and popularity you could then achieve such literary work as you could not think of attempting now. As for me, if I succeed in becoming independent of journalism in another ten years, I shall be luckier than men of much greater talent,—such as Bayard Taylor
Believe me, as ever, yours,
L. Hearn.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, June, 1883.
My dear Friend,—You have been very kind indeed to give me so pleasant an introduction to your personality;—I already feel as if we were more intimate, as if I knew you better and liked you more. A photograph is generally a surprise;—in your case it was not;—you are very much as I fancied you were—only more so.
I read with pleasure your article. The introduction was especially powerful. I must now, however, tell you frankly what I think would be most to your interest. When I wrote before I had no definite idea as to the scope or plan of your essay, nor did I know the Inter-Ocean desired it. Now I think it your duty to give the next article to that paper,—as the first is incomplete without it. It does not contain more than the parallel. However, the publication of your writing in the Inter-Ocean, even though unremunerative, will do you vastly more good than would the publication in our paper at a small price. The Inter-Ocean circulation is very large; and you must be advertised. It is not necessary to seek it, but it would be unwise to refuse it. In the mean time I shall call attention to you in our columns occasionally,—briefly of course. I only proposed T.-D. with the idea you might have need of a medium to publish your opinions and ideas. But so long as the Inter-Ocean takes an interest in you,—even without compensating you,—you have a right to congratulate yourself, as you are only beginning to make your voice heard in the wilderness. I shall bring your paper to Page Baker to-night,—who has just returned to town. Will send photo when I write again.
I would scarcely advise you to quote from my book. I am still too small a figure to attract any attention; and I think it would be best for you only to cite generally recognized authorities. Needless to say that I should feel greatly honoured and very grateful; but I think it would not be strictly to your interest to notice me until such time as I am recognized as a thinker, if such time shall ever arrive. With you it is very different;—your cloth—as we say in England—gives every gamin the right to review and praise you as a public teacher
Yours very affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, February, 1883.
Dear Sir,—Mr. Page M. Baker, managing editor of the Times-Democrat, to whose staff I belong, handed me your letter relative to the article on Gustave Doré—stating at the same time that it seemed to him the handsomest compliment ever paid to my work. I hasten to confirm the statement, and to thank you very sincerely for that delicate and nevertheless magistral criticism; for no one could have uttered a more forcible compliment in fewer words. As the author of a little volume of translations from Théophile Gautier I received a number of very encouraging and gratifying letters from Eastern literary men; but I must say that your letter upon my editorial gave me more pleasure than all of them, especially, perhaps, as manifesting an artistic sympathy with me in my admiration for the man whom I believe to have been the mightiest of modern artists.
Very gratefully and sincerely yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, March, 1883.
My dear Mr. O’Connor,—My delay in answering your charming letter was unavoidable, as I have been a week absent from the city upon an excursion to the swampy regions of southern Louisiana, in company with Harpers’ artist, for whom I am writing a series of Southern sketches. As I am already on good terms with the Harpers, your delicate letter to them cannot have failed to do me far more good than would have been the case had I been altogether unknown. I don’t know how to thank you, but trust that I may yet have the pleasure of trying to do so verbally, if you ever visit New Orleans.
Your books came to hand; and do great credit to your skill—I am myself a compositor and have held the office of proof-reader in a large publishing house, where I tried to establish an English system of punctuation with indifferent success. Thus I can appreciate the work. As yet I have not had time to read much of the report, but as the Life-Saving Service has a peculiar intrinsic interest I will expect to find much to enjoy in the report before long.
You are partly right about Gautier, and, I think, partly wrong. His idea of work was to illustrate with a mosaic of rare and richly-coloured words. But there is a wonderful tenderness, a nervous sensibility of feeling, an Oriental sensuousness of warmth in his creations which I like better than Victor Hugo’s marvellous style. Hugo, like the grand Goth that he is, liked the horrible, the grotesqueness of tragic mediævalism. Gautier followed the Greek ideal so potently presented in Lessing’s “Laocoön,” and sought the beautiful only. His poetry is, I believe, matchless in French literature—an engraved gem-work of words. Well, you can judge for yourself a little, by reading his two remarkable prose-fantasies—“Arria Marcella" and “Clarimonde”—in my translations of him, which you will receive from New York in a few days. Something evaporates in translation of course, and as the book was my first effort, there will be found divers inaccuracies and errors therein; but enough remains to give some idea of Gautier’s imaginative powers and descriptive skill. Will also forward you paper you ask for.
I regret having to write very hurriedly, as I have a great press of work upon my hands. You will hear from me again, however, more fully. A letter to my address as above given will reach me sooner than if sent to the Times-Democrat office
Very gratefully your friend,
L. Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, August, 1883.
My dear Mr. O’Connor,—I had feared that I had lost a rare literary friend. Your charming letter undeceived me, and your equally charming present revealed you to me in a totally new light. I had imagined you as a delicate amateur only: I did not recognize in you a Master. And after I had read your two articles,—articles written in a fashion realizing my long-cherished dream of English in splendid Latin attire,—I felt quite ashamed of my own work. You have a knowledge, too, of languages unfamiliar to me, which I honestly envy, and which is becoming indispensable in the higher spheres of literary criticism—I mean a knowledge of Italian and German. As for your long silence, it only remains for me to say that your letter filled me with that sympathy which, in certain sad moments, expresses itself only by a silent and earnest pressure of the hand,—because any utterance would sound strangely hollow, like an echo in some vast dim emptiness.
Your beautiful little book came like a valued supplement to an edition of “Leaves of Grass” in my library. I have always secretly admired Whitman, and would have liked on more than one occasion to express my opinion in public print. But in journalism this is not easy to do. There is no possibility of praising Whitman unreservedly in the ordinary newspaper, whose proprietors always tell you to remember that their paper “goes into respectable families,” or accuse you of loving obscene literature if you attempt controversy. Journalism is not really a literary profession. The journalist of to-day is obliged to hold himself ready to serve any cause,—like the condottieri of feudal Italy, or the free captains of other countries. If he can enrich himself sufficiently to acquire comparative independence in this really nefarious profession, then, indeed, he is able freely to utter his heart’s sentiments and indulge his tastes, like that æsthetic and wicked Giovanni Malatesta whose life Yriarte has written.
I do not think that I could ever place so lofty an estimate upon the poet’s work, however, as you give,—although no doubt rests in my mind as to your critical superiority. 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 me if the material be rich. I cannot content myself with ores and rough jewels. I want to see the gold purified and wrought into marvellous fantastic shapes; I want to see the jewels cut into roses of facets, or turned as by Greek cunning into faultless witchery of nude loveliness. And Whitman’s gold seems to me in the ore: his diamonds and emeralds in the rough. Would Homer be Homer to us but for the billowy roar of his mighty verse,—the perfect cadence of his song that has the regularity of ocean-diapason? I think not. And did not all the Titans of antique literature polish their lines, chisel their words, according to severest laws of art? Whitman’s is indeed a Titanic voice; but it seems to me the voice of the giant beneath the volcano,—half stifled, half uttered,—roaring betimes because articulation is impossible.
Beauty there is, but it must be sought for; it does not flash out from hastily turned leaves: it only comes to one after full and thoughtful perusal, like a great mystery whose key-word may only be found after long study. But the reward is worth the pain. That beauty is cosmical—it is world-beauty;—there is something of the antique pantheism in the book, and something larger too, expanding to the stars and beyond. What most charms me, however, is that which is most earthy and of the earth. I was amused at some of the criticisms—especially that in the Critic—to the effect that Mr. Whitman might have some taste for natural beauty, etc., as an animal has! Ah! that was a fine touch! Now it is just the animalism of the work which constitutes its great force to me—not a brutal animalism, but a human animalism, such as the thoughts of antique poets reveal to us: the inexplicable delight of being, the intoxication of perfect health, the unutterable pleasures of breathing mountain-wind, of gazing at a blue sky, of leaping into clear deep water and drifting with a swimmer’s dreamy confidence down the current, with strange thoughts that drift faster. Communion with Nature teaches philosophy to those who love that communion; and Nature imposes silence sometimes, that we may be forced to think:—the men of the plains say little. “You don’t feel like talking out there,” I heard one say: “the silence makes you silent.” Such a man could not tell us just what he thought under that vastness, in the heart of that silence: but Whitman tells us for him. And he also tells us what we ought to think, or to remember, about things which are not of the wilderness but of the city. He is an animal, if the Critic pleases, but a human animal—not a camel that weeps and sobs at the sight of the city’s gates. He is rude, joyous, fearless, artless,—a singer who knows nothing of musical law, but whose voice is as the voice of Pan. And in the violent magnetism of the man, the great vital energy of his work, the rugged and ingenuous kindliness of his speech, the vast joy of his song, the discernment by him of the Universal Life,—I cannot help imagining that I perceive something of the antique sylvan deity, the faun or the satyr. Not the distorted satyr of modern cheap classics: but the ancient and godly one, “inseparably connected with the worship of Dionysus,” and sharing with that divinity the powers of healing, saving, and foretelling, not less than the orgiastic pleasures over which the androgynous god presided.
I see great beauty in Whitman, great force, great cosmical truths sung of in mystical words; but the singer seems to me nevertheless barbaric. You have called him a bard. He is! But his bard-songs are like the improvisations of a savage skald, or a forest Druid: immense the thought! mighty the words! but the music is wild, harsh, rude, primæval. I cannot believe it will endure as a great work endures: I cannot think the bard is a creator, but only a precursor—only the voice of one crying in the wilderness—Make straight the path for the Great Singer who is to come after me!... And therefore even though I may differ from you in the nature of my appreciation of Whitman I love the soul of his work, and I think it a duty to give all possible aid and recognition to his literary priesthood. Whatsoever you do to defend, to elevate, to glorify his work you do for the literature of the future, for the cause of poetical liberty, for the cause of mental freedom. Your book is doubly beautiful to me, therefore: and I believe it will endure to be consulted in future times, when men shall write the “History of the Literary Movement of 1900,” as men have already written the "Histoire du Romantisme.”
I don’t think you missed very much of my work in the T.-D. I have not been doing so well. The great heat makes one’s brain languid, barren, dusty. Then I have been making desperate efforts to do some magazine work. Thanks for your praise of “The Pipes of Hameline.” I wish, indeed, that I could drag myself out of this newspaper routine,—even though slowly, like a turtle struggling over uneven ground. Journalism dwarfs, stifles, emasculates thought and style. As for my translation of Gautier, it has many grave errors I am ashamed of, but it is not castrated. My pet stories in it are “Clarimonde” and “Arria Marcella.”
Victor Hugo was indeed the Arthur of the Romantic Movement, and Gautier was but one of his knights, though the best of them—a Lancelot. I think his “Emaux et Camées” surpass Hugo’s work in word-chiselling, in goldsmithery; but Hugo’s fancy overarches all, like the vault of the sky. His prose is like the work of Angelo—the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, the figures described by Emilio Castelar as painted by flashes of lightning. He is one of those who appear but once in five hundred years. Gautier is not upon Hugo’s level. But while Hugo wrought like a Gothic sculptor, largely, weirdly, wondrously, Gautier could create mosaics of word-jewelry without equals. The work is small, delicate, elfish: it will endure as long as the French language, even though it figure in the Hugo architecture only as arabesque-work or stained glass or inlaid pavement.
Oh yes! you will catch it for those articles! you will have the fate of every champion of an unpopular cause,—thorns at every turn, which may turn into roses.
I hope to see you some day. Will always have time to write. Sometimes my letter may be short; but not often. Believe me, sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO JOHN ALBEE
New Orleans, 1883.
Dear Sir,—Your very kind letter, forwarded to me by Mr. Worthington, was more of an encouragement and comfort than you, perhaps, even desired. One naturally launches his first literary effort with fear and trembling; and at such a time kind or unkind words may have a lasting effect upon his future hopes and aims.
The little stories were translated five years ago, in the intervals of rest possible to snatch during reportorial duty on a Western paper. I was then working fourteen hours a day. Subsequently I was four years vainly seeking a publisher.
Naturally enough, the stories are not even now all that I could wish them to be; but I trust that before long I may escape so far from the treadmill of daily newspaper labour as to produce something better in point of literary execution. 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.
This may seem only a foolish hope,—unsubstantial as a ghost; but with youth, health and such kindly encouragement as you have given me, I believe that it may yet be realized. Of course a little encouragement from the publishers will also be necessary. Believe me very gratefully yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, September, 1883.
Dear Krehbiel,—I trust you will be able to read the hideously written music I sent you in batches,—according as I could find leisure to copy it. The negro songs are taken from a most extraordinary book translated into French from the Arabic, and published at Paris by a geographical society. The author was one of those errant traders who travel yearly through the desert to the Soudan, and beyond into Timbuctoo occasionally, to purchase slaves and elephants’ teeth from those almost unknown Arab sultans or negro kings who rule the black ant-hills of Central Africa. I have only yet obtained the great volume relating to Ouaday; the volume on Darfour is coming. Perron, the learned translator, in his “Femmes Arabes” (published at Algiers), gives some curious chapters on ancient Arab music which I must try to send you one of these days. The Japanese book—a rather costly affair printed in gold and colours—is rapidly becoming scarce. I expect soon to have some Hindoo music; as I have a subscription for a library of folk-lore and folk-lore music of all nations, of which only 17 volumes are published so far—Elzevirians. These mostly relate to Europe, and contain much Breton, Provençal, Norman, and other music. But there will be several volumes of Oriental popular songs, etc. Some day, I was thinking, we might together get up a little volume on the musical legends of all nations, introducing each legend by appropriate music.
I have nearly finished a collection of Oriental stories from all sorts of queer sources,—the Sanscrit, Buddhist, Talmudic, Persian, Polynesian, Finnish literatures, etc.,—which I shall try to publish. But their having been already in print will militate against them.
Couldn’t get a publisher for the fantastics, and I am, after all, glad of it; for I feel somewhat ashamed of them now. I have saved a few of the best pieces, which will be rewritten at some future time if I succeed in other matters. Another failure was the translation of Flaubert’s “Temptation of Saint Anthony,” which no good publisher seems inclined to undertake. The original is certainly one of the most exotically strange pieces of writing in any language, and weird beyond description. Some day I may take a notion to print it myself. At present I am also busy with a dictionary of Creole Proverbs (this is a secret), four hundred or more of which I have arranged; and, by the way, I have quite a Creole library, embracing the Creole dialects of both hemispheres. I have likewise obtained favour with two firms, Harpers’, and Scribners’—both of whom have recently promised to consider favourably anything I choose to send in. You see I have my hands full; and an enormous mass of undigested matter to assimilate and crystallize into something.
So much about myself, in reply to your question.... Your Armenian legend was very peculiar indeed. There is nothing exactly like it either in Baring-Gould’s myths (“Mountain of Venus”) or Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology,” or any of the Oriental folk-lore I have yet seen. The ghostly sweetheart is a universal idea, and the phantom palace also; but the biting of the finger is a delightful novelty. Many thanks for the pretty little tale.
I don’t think you will see me in New York this winter. I shudder at the bare idea of cold. Speak to me of blazing deserts, of plains smoking with volcanic vapours, of suns ten times larger, and vast lemon-coloured moons,—and venomous plants that writhe like vipers and strangle like boas,—and clouds of steel-blue flies,—and skeletons polished by ants,—and atmospheres heavy as those of planets nearer to the solar centre!—but hint not to me of ice and slush and snow and black-frost winds. Why can’t you come down to see me? I’ll show you nice music: I’ll enable you to note down the musical cries of the Latin-faced venders of herbs and gombo fève and calas and latanir and patates.
If you can’t come, I’ll try to see you next spring or summer; but I would rather be whipped with scorpions than visit a Northern city in the winter months. In fact few residents here would dare to do it,—unless well used to travelling. Some day I must write something about the physiological changes produced here by climate. In an article I wrote for Harper’s six months ago, and which ought to appear soon (as I was paid for it), you will observe some brief observations on the subject; but the said subject is curious enough to write a book about. By the way, I have become scientific—I write nearly all the scientific editorials for our paper, which you sometimes see, no doubt. Farney ought to spend a few months here: it would make him crazy with joy to perceive those picturesquenesses which most visitors never see.
I thought I would go to Cincinnati next week or so; but I’m afraid it’s too cold now. If I do go, I’ll write you.
As to your protest about correspondence, I think you’re downright wrong; but I won’t renew the controversy. Anyhow I suppose we keep track of each other, with affectionate curiosity. I am quite sorry you missed my friend Page Baker: he is a splendid type,—you would have become fast friends at once. Never mind, though! if you ever come down here, we’ll make you enjoy yourself in earnest. Please excuse this rambling letter
Your Creolized friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S. By the bye, have you the original music of the Muezzin’s call,—as called by the first of all Muezzins, Bìlâl the Abyssinian, to whom it was taught by Our Lord Mohammed? Bìlâl the black Abyssinian, whose voice was the mightiest and sweetest in Islam. In those first days, Bìlâl was persecuted as the slave of the persecuted Prophet of God. And in the "Gulistan,” it is told how he suffered. But after Our Lord had departed into the chamber of Allah,—and the tawny horsemen of the desert had ridden from Medina even to the gates of India, conquering and to conquer,—and the young crescent of Islam, slender as a sword, had waxed into a vast moon of glory that filled the world,—Bìlâl still lived with that wonderful health of years given unto the people of his race. But he only sang for the Kalif. And the Kalif was Omar. So, one day, it came to pass, that the people of Damascus, whither Omar had travelled upon a visit, begged the Caliph, saying: “O Commander of the Faithful, we pray thee that thou ask Bìlâl to sing the call to prayer for us, even as it was taught him by Our Lord Mohammed.” And Omar requested Bìlâl. Now Bìlâl was nearly a century old; but his voice was deep and sweet as ever. And they aided him to ascend the minaret. Then, into the midst of the great silence burst once more the mighty African voice of Bìlâl,—singing the Adzan, even as it has still been sung for more than twelve hundred years from all the minarets of Islam:
“God is Great!
God is Great!
I bear witness there is no other God but God!
I bear witness that Mohammed is the Prophet of God!
Come to Prayer!
Come to Prayer!
Come unto Salvation!
God is Great!
God is Great!
There is no other God but God!”
And Omar wept and all the people with him.
This is an outline. I’d like to have the music of that. Sent to London for it, and couldn’t get it.
L. H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1883.
I’m so delighted with that music that I don’t know what to do.
First, I went to my friend Grueling, the organist, and got him to play and sing it. “It is very queer,” he said; “but it seems to me like chants I’ve heard some of these negroes sing.” Then I took it to a piano-player, and he played it for me. Then I went to a cornet-player—I think the cornet gives the best idea of the sound of a tenor voice—and he played it exquisitely, beautifully. Those arabesques about the name of Allah are simply divine! I noticed the difference clearly. The second version seems suspended, as a song eternal,—something never to be finished so long as waves sing and winds call, and worlds circle in space. So I thought of Edwin Arnold’s lines:—
“Suns that burn till day has flown,
Stars that are by night restored,
Are thy dervishes, O Lord,
Wheeling round thy golden throne!”
I believe I’ll use both songs. The suspended character of the second has a great and pathetic poetry in it. Please tell me in your next letter what kind of voice Bìlâl ought to have—being a woolly-headed Abyssinian. I suppose I’ll have to make him a tenor. I can’t imagine a basso making those flourishes about the name of the Eternal.
Next week I’ll send you selections of Provençal and other music which I believe are new. My library is very fine. I have a collection worth a great deal of money which you would like to see.
If you ever come down here, you could stay with me nicely, and have a pleasant artistic time.
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H.E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, October, 1883.
My dear Krehbiel,—I have been too sick with a strangling cold to write as I had wished, or to copy for you something for which I had already obtained the music-paper. Nevertheless I am going to ask another favour. I hope you can find time to copy separately for me the Arabic words of the Adzan: I prefer Villoteau. As for Koran-reading, it would delight me; but please give me the number of the sura, or chapter, from which the words are taken.
My article on Bìlâl is progressing: the second part being complete. I am dividing it into four Sections. But I do not feel quite so hopeful now as I did before. Magazine-writing is awful labour. Six weeks at least are required to prepare an article, and then the probability is that the magazine editor will make beastly changes: my article on Cable suffered at his hands. The Harpers change nothing; but they keep an article over for twelve months and more. One of mine is not yet published. I have been hoping that if my “Bìlâl” takes, you might follow it up with an article on Arabic music generally: the open letter department of Scribner’s pays well, and the Harpers pay even better. I would like to see you with a series, which could afterward be united into a volume: you could copyright each one. This is only a suggestion.
I will not make much use of the Koran-reading in “Bìlâl:” I want to leave that wholly to you. I feel even guilty for borrowing your pithy and forcible observation upon the cantillado.
If you have a chance to visit some of your public libraries, please see whether they have Maisonneuve’s superb series: “Les Littératures populaires de toutes les nations.” I have fourteen volumes of it, rich in musical oddities. If they have it not, I will send you extracts from time to time. Also see if they have Mélusine: my volume of it (1878) contains the music of a Greek dance, older than the friezes of the Parthenon. Of course, if you can see them, it will be better than the imperfect copying of an ignoramus in music like me.
I grossly offended a Creole musician the other day. He denied in toto the African sense of melody. “But,” said I, “did you not tell me that you spent hours trying to imitate the notes of a roustabout-song on your flute?” “I did,” he replied, “but not because it pleased me—only because I was curious to learn why I could not imitate it: it still baffles me, but it is nevertheless an abomination to my ear!” “Nay!” said I, “it hath a most sweet sound to me; and to the ethnologist a most fascinating interest. Verily, I would rather listen to it, than hear a symphony of Beethoven!” ... Whereupon he walked away in high fury; and now ... he speaketh to me no more!
Yours very thankfully,
L. Hearn.
TO H.E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1883.
My dear Krehbiel,—There is nothing in magazine-work in the way of profit; for the cent-a-word pay does not really recompense the labour required: but the magazines introduce one to publishers, and publishers select men to write their books. Magazine-work is the introduction to book-work; and book-work pays doubly—in money and reputation. I hope to climb up slowly this way—it takes time, but offers a sure issue. You could do so much more rapidly.
I find in my Oriental catalogues “Villoteau—Mémoire sur la Musique de l’antique Egypte.—Paris: Maisonneuve & Cie, 1883 (15 fr.).” Wonder if you have the work in any of your public libraries. If you have not, and you would like to get it, I can obtain it from Paris duty-free next time I write to Maisonneuve, from whom I am obtaining a great number of curious books.
You must have noticed in the papers the real or pretended discovery of an ancient Egyptian melody,—the notes being represented by owls ascending and descending the musical scale. Hope you will get to see it. I have been thinking that we might some day, together, work up a charming collection of musical legends: each legend followed by a specimen-melody, with learned dissertation by H. Edward Krehbiel. But that will be for the days when we shall be “well-known and highly esteemed authors.” I think I could furnish some singular folk-lore.
Meanwhile “Bìlâl” has been finished. I wrote to Harper’s Magazine;—the article was returned with a very complimentary autograph letter from Alden, praising it warmly, but recommending its being offered to the Atlantic, as he did not know when he could “find room for it.” Find room for it! Ah, bah!... I am sorry: because I had written him about your share in it, and hoped, if successful, it would tempt him to write you. It is now in the hands of another magazine. I used your Koran-fragment in the form of a musical footnote.
I notice you called it a “brick.” Are you sure this is the correct word? Each sura (or chapter) indeed signifies a “course of bricks in a wall;” but also signifies “a rank of soldiers”—and the verses, which were never numbered in the earlier MSS., are so irregular that the poetry of the term “brick” could scarcely apply to them. However, I may be wrong.
I was delighted with your delight, as expressed in your beautiful letter upon the Hebrew ceremonial. Hebrew literature has been my hobby for some time past: I have Hershon’s “Talmudic Miscellany;” Stauben’s “Scènes de la Vie Juive” (full of delicious traditions); Kompert’s “Studies of Jewish Life,” which you have no doubt read in the original German; and Schwab’s French translation of the beginning of the Jerusalem Talmud (together with the Babylonian Berachoth), 5 vols. I confess the latter is, as a whole, unreadable; but the legends in it are without parallel in weirdness and singularity. Such miscellaneous reading of this sort as I have done has given new luminosity to my ideas of the antique Hebrew life; and enabled me to review them without the gloom of Biblical tradition,—especially the nightmarish darkness of the Pentateuch. I like to associate Hebrew ceremonies rather with the wonderful Talmudic days of the Babylonian rabbonim than with the savage primitiveness of the years of Exodus and Deuteronomy. There are some queer things about music in the Talmud; but they are sometimes extravagant as that story about the conch-shell blown at the birth of Buddha—“where of the sound rolled on unceasingly for four years!” The swarthy fishermen of our swampy lakes do blow conch-shells by way of marine signalling; and whenever I hear them I think of that monstrous conch-shell told of in the Nidānakathā.
As I write it seemeth to me that I behold, overshadowing the paper, the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes. Now in New York! How the old night-forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher toward the supreme hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East; whence as legendary word hath it—“lightning ever cometh.” Remember me very warmly to my old comrade Tunison.
But I think it more probable I shall see you here than that you shall see me there. New York has become something appalling to my imagination—perhaps because I have been drawing my ideas of it from caricatures: something cyclopean without solemnity, something pandemoniac without grotesqueness,—preadamite bridges,—superimpositions of iron roads higher than the aqueducts of the Romans,—gloom, vapour, roarings and lightnings. When I think of it, I feel more content with my sunlit marshes,—and the frogs,—and the gnats,—and the invisible plagues lurking in visible vapours,—and the ancientness,—and the vast languor of the land. Even our vegetation here, funereally drooping in the great heat, seems to dream of dead things—to mourn for the death of Pan. After a few years here the spirit of the land has entered into you,—and the languor of the place embraces you with an embrace that may not be broken;—thoughts come slowly, ideas take form sluggishly as shapes of smoke in heavy air; and a great horror of work and activity and noise and bustle roots itself within your soul,—I mean brain. Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul.
I am afraid you have read the poorest of Cable’s short stories. “Jean-ah Poquelin,” “Belles-Demoiselles,” are much better than “Tite Poulette.” There is something very singular to me in Cable’s power. It is not a superior style; it is not a minutely finished description—for it will often endure no close examination at all: nevertheless his stories have a puissant charm which is hard to analyze. His serial novel—“The Grandissimes”—is not equal to the others; but I think the latter portion of “Dr. Sevier” will surprise many. He did me the honour to read nearly the whole book to me. Cultivate him, if you get a chance.
Baker often talks with me about you. You would never have any difficulty in obtaining a fine thing here. Perhaps you will be the reverse of flattered by this bit of news; but the proprietors here think they can make the T.-D. a bigger paper than it is, and rival the Eastern dailies. For my part I hope they will do it; but they lack system, experience, and good men, to some extent. Now good men are not easily tempted to cast their fortunes here at present. It will be otherwise in time; the city is really growing into a metropolis,—a world’s market for merchants of all nations,—and will be made healthier and more beautiful year by year.
Good-bye for the present
Your very sincere friend,
L. Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, 1883.
My dear O’Connor,—I felt the same regret on finishing your letter that I have often experienced on completing a brief but delightful novelette: I wanted more,—and yet I had come to the end!... Your letters are all treasured up;—they are treats, and one atones for years of silence. My dear friend, you must never trouble yourself to write when you feel either tired or disinclined: when I think I have the power to interest you, I will always take advantage of it, without expecting you to write. I know what routine is, and what weariness is; and some day I think we shall meet, and arrange for a still more pleasant intimacy.
Your preference for Boutimar pleases me: Boutimar was my pet. There is a little Jewish legend in the collection—Esther—somewhat resembling it in pathos.
Your observation about my knowledge is something I cannot accept; for in positive acquirements I am even exceptionally ignorant. By purchasing queer books and following odd subjects I have been able to give myself the air of knowing more than I do; but none of my work would bear the scrutiny of a specialist; I would like, however, to show you my library. It cost me only about $2000; but every volume is queer. Knowing that I have nothing resembling genius, and that any ordinary talent must be supplemented with some sort of curious study in order to place it above the mediocre line, I am striving to woo the Muse of the Odd, and hope to succeed in thus attracting some little attention. This coming summer I propose making my first serious effort at original work—a very tiny volume of sketches in our Creole archipelago at the skirts of the Gulf. I am seeking the Orient at home, among our Lascar and Chinese colonies, and the Prehistoric in the characteristics of strange European settlers.
The trouble kindly taken by you in transcribing the little words of praise by a lady was more than compensated by the success of its purpose, I fancy. The only pleasure, indeed, that an author derives from his labours is that of hearing such commendations from appreciative or sympathetic readers. Your sending copies “hither and thither” was too kind; I could scold you for it! Still, the consequences indicated that the book may some day reach a new edition; and I receive nothing until the publisher pockets $1000.
Have you seen the exquisite new edition of Arnold’s “Light of Asia”? It has enchanted me,—perfumed my mind as with the incense of a strangely new and beautiful worship. After all, Buddhism in some esoteric form may prove the religion of the future. Is not the cycle of transmigration actually proven in the vast evolution from nomad to man,—from worm to King through innumerable myriads of brute form? Is not the tendency of all modern philosophy toward the acceptance of the ancient Indian teaching that the visible is but an emanation of the Invisible,—a delusion,—a creature, or a shadow, of the Supreme Dream? What are the heavens of all Christian fancies, after all, but Nirvana,—extinction of individuality in the eternal interblending of man with divinity; for a bodiless, immaterial, non-sensuous condition means nothingness, and no more. And the life and agony and death of universes, are these not pictured forth in the Oriental teachings that all things appear and disappear alternately with the slumber or the awakening, the night or the day, of the Self-Existent? Finally, he efforts of Romanes and Darwin and Vignoli to convince us of the interrelation—the brotherhood of animals and of men were anticipated by Gautama. I have an idea that the Right Man could now revolutionize the whole Occidental religious world by preaching the Oriental faith
Very affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
If Symonds praises Whitman, I stand reproved for my least doubts; for he is the very apostle of classicism and form.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, December, 1883.
Dear Krehbiel,—I greatly enjoyed that sharp, fresh, breezy letter from Feldwisch, which I re-enclose with thanks for the pleasure given. While I am greatly delighted with his success, I cannot say I have been surprised: he possessed such rare and splendid qualities of integrity and manliness—coupled with uncommon quickness of business perception—that I would not have been astonished to hear of Congressman Feldwisch,—always supposing it were possible to be a politician and an upright member of modern American society,—which is doubtful. Please let me have his exact address;—I would like to write him once in a while.
After all, I believe you are right in regard to magazine-work. I fully appreciated the effect upon a thoroughbred artist of being asked to write something flimsy,—ask Liszt to play Yankee Doodle! Our magazines—excepting the Atlantic—do not appear to be controlled by, or in the interest of, scholars. Fancy how I felt when asked (indirectly) by the Century to write something “SNAPPY”!—even I, who am no specialist, and if anything of an artist, only a word-artist in embryo!... I also suspect you are correct in your self-interest: your forte will never be light work, because your knowledge is too extensive, and your artistic feeling too deep, to be wasted upon puerilities. It has always seemed to me that your style gains in solid strength and beauty as the subject you treat is deeper. To any mind which has grasped the general spirit and aspect of a science, isolated facts are worthy of consideration only in their relation to universal and, perhaps, eternal laws: anecdote for the mere sake of anecdote is simply unendurable.
Five years of hard study here have resulted in altogether changing my own literary inclinations,—yet, unfortunately, to no immediate purpose that I can see; for I must always remain too ignorant to succeed as a specialist in any one topic. But a romantic fact—the possession of which would have driven me wild with joy a few years ago, or even one year ago, perhaps—now affects me not at all unless I can perceive its relation to some general principle to be elucidated. And the mere ideas and melody of a poem seem to me of small moment unless the complex laws of versification be strictly obeyed. Hence I feel no inclination to attempt a story or sketch unless I can find some theme of which the treatment might do more than gratify fancy. Unless a romance be instructive,—or inaugurate a totally novel style,—I think it can have no lasting value. The old enthusiasm has completely died out of me. But meanwhile I am trying to fill my brain with unfamiliar facts on special topics, believing that some day or other I shall be able to utilize them in a new way. I have thought, for example, of trying to write physiological novelettes or stories,—based upon scientific facts in regard to races and characters, but nevertheless of the most romantic aspect possible: natural but never naturalistic. Still, I am so fully conscious that this idea has been suggested by popular foreign novelists, that I fear it may prove merely a passing ambition.
Another great affliction is my inability to travel. I hate the life of every day in connection with any idea of story-writing: I would give anything to be a literary Columbus,—to discover a Romantic America in some West Indian or North African or Oriental region,—to describe the life that is only fully treated of in universal geographies or ethnological researches. Won’t you sympathize with me?... If I could only become a Consul at Bagdad, Algiers, Ispahan, Benares, Samarkand, Nippo, Bangkok, Ninh-Binh,—or any part of the world where ordinary Christians do not like to go! Here is the nook in which my romanticism still hides. But I know I have not the physical qualifications to fit me for such researches, nor the linguistic knowledge required to make such researches valuable. I suppose I shall have to settle down at last to something horribly prosaic, and even devoid of philosophic interest.... Alas! O that I were a travelling shoemaker, or a player upon the sambuke!
I have two—nay three—projects sown: the seed has not yet sprouted. I expressed to Harpers’ a little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs—a mere compilation, of course, from many unfamiliar sources; “Bìlâl” is under consideration at the Century (where, I fear, they will cut up every sentence which clashes with Baptist ideas on the sinfulness of Islam); and my compilation of Oriental stories is being “seriously examined” by J. R. Osgood & Co....
This letter is getting wearisome; but I don’t know how soon I can again snatch time to write.... Ah yes!—for God’s sake (I suppose you believe just a small bit in God) don’t try to conceive how I could sympathize with Cable! Because I never sympathized with him at all. His awful faith—which to me represents an undeveloped mental structure—gives a neutral tint to his whole life among us. There is a Sunday-school atmosphere.... But Cable is more liberal-minded than his creed; he has also rare analytical powers on a small scale.... Belief I do not think is ridiculous altogether;—nothing is ridiculous in the general order of the world: but at a certain point it prevents the mind from expanding;—its horizon is solid stone and its sky a material vault. One must cease to believe before being able to comprehend either the reason or beauty of belief. The loss is surely well recompensed by the vast enlargement of vision—the opening up of the Star-spaces,—the recognition of the Eternal Life throbbing simultaneously in the vein of an insect or the scintillations of a million suns,—the comprehension of the relations of Infinity to human existence, or at least the understanding that there are such relations,—and that the humblest atom of substance can tell a story more wondrous than all the epics, romances, legends, or myths devised by ancient or modern fancy.—Now I am getting long-winded again. I conclude with a promise soon to forward another little bit of queer music. Hope you like the last. Come down here and I will turn you loose in my library. I need hardly specify that if you come, your natural expenses will be represented by 0,—that is, if you condescend to live in my neighbourhood. It is not romantic; but it is comfortable. I’m sick of Creole Romance—it nearly cost me my life.
Bye, my friend
Your old goblin,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I hope you may prove right and I wrong in my judgement of ——. As you say, I have a peculiar and unfortunate disposition; nevertheless I had better reasons for my suggestions to you than it is now necessary to specify.
Your syrinx discoveries seem to me of very uncommon importance. What is now important to learn is this: Is the syrinx an original instrument in those regions whence the American and West Indian slave-elements were drawn?—an account of which slave-sources is to be found in Edwards’s “History of the West Indies.” The Congo dances with their music are certainly importations from the West Coast—the Ivory Coast. Have you seen Livingstone’s account of the multiple pipe (chalumeau, Hartmann calls it in French) among the Batokas? I would like to know if it is a syrinx. We have no big public libraries here; but if you have time to make some West African researches, one could perhaps trace out the whole history of the syrinx’s musical migration. I send you the latest information I have been able to pick up. Just so soon as I can get the material ready, will send also information regarding the various West Indian dances in brief—also the negro-Creole bottle-dance, danced over an upright bottle to the chant—
“Ça ma coupé,—
Ça ma coupé,—
Ça ma coupé,—
Ça!
Ça ma coupé,—
Ça ma coupé,—
Ça ma coupé,—
Ça!”
I’ve reopened the envelope to tell you something I forgot—a suggestion.
I was quite pleased to hear you like my Chinese paragraph; and I have a little proposition. Do you know that a most delightful book was recently published in France, consisting wholly of odd impressions about strange books and strange people exchanged between friends by mail. Each impression should be very brief. Why couldn’t we do this: Once every month I’ll write you the queerest and most outlandish fancy I can get up—based upon fact, of course—not more than two hundred words; and you write me the most awful thing that has struck you in relation to new musical discoveries. In a year’s time we would have twenty-four little pieces between us, which would certainly be original enough to elaborate into more artistic form; and we could plot together how to outrage the public by printing them. I would contribute $100 or so—if we couldn’t find an enthusiastic printer. The book would be very small.
Everything should be perfectly monstrous, you know—ordinary facts, or ideas that could by any chance occur to commonly-balanced minds, ought to be rigidly excluded.
I don’t think I can go North till April. March would be too cold for me. The temptation of hearing grand singers is not now strong,—I’m sorry to say,—for I never go to the theatre on account of the artificial light, never read or write after dark; and I anticipate no special pleasure except that of seeing an old friend, and talking much monstrous talk about matters which I but half understand.
Yours very affectionately,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1884.
Extra volume of the series: Price, $500. Large folio.
The Battle-Cries of All Nations. With accompaniment of Barbaric instruments. Arranged for modern Orchestral reproduction.
I. Aryan Division.—Battle-Shouts of Gothic Races.—Teutoni and Cimbri—Frank and Alleman—Merovingian—The Roar of Pharamond. Iberian.—The Triumph of Herman.—Viking War-Chants.—The Song of Roland as sung by Taillefer.—Celtic and Early British War-Cries, etc., etc.
II. Semitic Division.—Hebrew War-Cries. “God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the Trumpet.”—Arabs and Crusaders.—“Allah—hu-u-u Akbar!” etc. Berber Cries.—The Numidian Cavalry.
(The work also contains Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Scythian war-cries; war-cries of the Parthians and Huns, of the Mongols and Tartars. Sounds of the Battle of Chalons; Cries of the Carthaginian mercenaries; Macedonian rallying-call, etc., etc. In the modern part are included Polynesian, African, Aztec, Peruvian, Patagonian and American. A magnificent musical version of the chant of Ragnar Lodbrok will be found in the Appendix: “We smote with our swords.”)
(This is not intended as a part of our private extravaganzas: but is written as a just punishment for your silence.)
Vol. I. Monograph upon the Popular Melodies Of Extinct Races. XXIII and 700 pp.
Vol. II. Music of Nomad Races. Introduction. “Men of Prey; the Falcon and Eagle Races of Mankind.” Part I. The Arabs. Part II. The Touareg of the Greater Desert. Part III. The Turkish and Tartar Tribes of Central Asia. With 1600 examples of melodies, engravings of musical instruments, etc.
Vol. III. Manifestation of Climatic Influence In Popular Melody. In Two Parts. Part I. Melodies of Mountain-dwellers. Part II. Melodies of Valley dwellers and inhabitants of low countries. (3379 Ex.)
Vol. IV. Race-Temper as Evidenced in the Popular Music of Various Peoples. Part I. The Melancholy Tendency. Part II. The Joyous Temperament. Part III. Ferocity. Part IV. etc., etc.,—2700 ex.
Vol. V. Peculiar Characteristics of Erotic Music in All Countries. (This volume contains nearly 7000 examples of curious music from India, Japan, China, Burmah, Siam, Arabia, Polynesia, Africa, and many other parts of the world.)
Vol. VI. Music of the Dance in the Orient. (3500 pp.)
Chap. I. The Mussulman Bayaderes of India (17 photolith).
Chap. II. The Bayaderes of Hinduism—especially of the Krishna and Sivaite sects.
Chap. III. Examples of Burmese Dance—music (with 25 photographic plates).
Chap. IV. The Tea-house dancers of Japan; and Courtesans of Yokohama. (34 Photo-Engrav.)
Chap. V. Chinese dancing melodies. (23 Photo-Engrav.)
Chap. VI. Tartar dance-melodies: the nomad dancing girls. (50 beautiful coloured plates.)
Chap. VII. Circassian and Georgian Dances, with Music. Examples of Daghestan melodies (49 plates).
Chap. VIII. Oriental War-Dances (480 melodies).
Vol. VII. The Weird in Savage Music (with 169 highly curious examples).
Vol. VIII. History of Creole Music in The Occidental Indies.
Part I. Franco-African Melody, and its ultimate development. (298 ex.)
Part II. Spanish. Creole music and the history of its formation (359 examples of Havanese and other West Indian airs are given).
Vol. IX-X-XI. Melodies of African Races. (This highly important work contains no less than 5000 different melodies, and a complete description of all African musical instruments known, illustrated with numerous engravings.) Price per vol., $27.50.
Vol. XII. Reconstruction of Antique Melodies after the Irrefutable Scientific System of the German School of Musical Evolutionists. (By this new process of anthropological research, it is now possible to reconstruct a lost melody, precisely as it was previously possible to affirm the existence of an extinct species of mammal which left no fossil record of which we know.)
Vol. XIII. Magical Melodies. The music of Apollo and Orpheus.—The Melodies of Wäinamöinen.—The Harp-playing of Merlin the Great.—Exhumation of the extraordinary Wizard-music referred to in the Kalewala.—Melodies that petrify.—Melodies that kill.—Melodies which evoke storms and tempests.—The Hávamál of Odin.—Scandinavian belief in chants which seduce female virtue.—The Indian legend of Amaron.—Polynesian magic song.—The thief’s song that lulls to sleep: a musical “hand-of-glory.”—The invocation of demons by song.—Examples of the melodies which fiends obey.—Songs that bring down fire from heaven.—Strange Hindoo legend of the singer consumed by his own song.—The melodies of the greater magic.—The chants that change the colour of the Moon.—Deva-music: the conch-shells sounded at the birth of Buddha.—Notes on the Kalewala legends of singers who made the sun and moon to pause in heaven and changed the courses of the stars.
Vol. XIV. The Melodies of Mighty Lamentation. Isis and Osiris.—Demeter and Persephone.—“By the Rivers of Babylon.”—Jeremiah’s knowledge of music.—Lamentation of Thomyris.—The musicians of Shah Jehan, etc.
Apocalyptic music of the Bible.
Vol. XV. Mourning for the Dead. History of cries of mourning in all nations.—Description of ancient writers.—Howling of the women of the Teutoni and Cimbri.—Terror of the Romans at the hideous sounds. (With 1300 examples of musical wailing among ancient nations.)—Modern wailing.—Survival of the Ancient Mourning Cry among modern peoples.—The Corsican voceri.—African funeral-chants.—Negro-Creole funeral-wail. (Tout pití çabri—ça Zoé non yé).—Irish keening.—Gradual development of funeral-music, etc., etc.
Vol. XVI. Songs of Triumph.—“Up to the everlasting Gates of Capitolian Jove.”—Triumphal Chants of Rameses and Thotmes.—Assyrian triumphal marches.—A Tartar triumph.—Arabian melodies of war-joy, etc., etc.
KOROL AR C’HLEZE (The Sword-Dance)
Ancient dialect of Léon (Bretagne)
Goad, gwin, ha Korol.
D’id Heol!
Goad, gwin, ha Korol.
Tan! tan! dir! oh! dir! tan! tan! dir ha tan!
Tann! tann! tir! ha tonn! tonn! tir ha tir ha tann!
Ha Korol ha Kan,
Kan, ha Kann!
Ha Korol ha Kan.
Tan! tan!...
Korol ar c’hleze,
Enn eze;
Korol ar c’hleze.
Tan! tan!...
Kan ar c’hleze glaz
A gar laz;
Kan ar c’hleze glaz.
Tan! tan!...
Kann ar c’hleze gone
Ar Rone!
Kann ar c’hleze gone.
Tan! tan!...
Kleze! Rone braz
Ar stourmeaz!
Kleze! Rone braz!
Tan! tan!...
Kaneveden gen
War da benn!
Kaneveden gen!
Tan! tan! dir! oh! dir! tan! tan dir ha tan!
Tann! tann! tir! ha tonn! tonn! tann! tir ha tir ha tann!
LITERAL TRANSLATION
Blood, wine, and dance to thee, O Sun!—blood, wine and dance!
And dance and song, song and battle! dance and song!
The Dance of Swords, in circle!—the dance of swords.
Song of the Blue Sword that loves murder!—song of the blue sword!
Battle where the Savage Sword is King!—battle of the savage sword!
O Sword!—O great King of the fields of battle!—O Sword! O great King!
Let the Rainbow shine about thy brow!—let the rainbow shine!
(The chorus is literal in my own translation, or rather metrification!)
(Rude metrical translation by your most humble servant.)
CELTIC SWORD-SONG
Dance, battle-blood and wine,
O Sun, are thine!
Dance, battle-blood, and wine!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel!—O Steel!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel and Fire!
O Oak!—O Oak!
O Earth!—O Waves!
O Waves!—O Earth!
O Earth and Oak!
The dance-chant and the death-lock
In battle-shock!—
The dance-chant and the death-lock!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel!—O Steel!...
The Sword-dance, circling
In a ring!—
The Sword-dance, circling!
O Fire! O Fire!
O Steel! O Steel!...
Sing the Slaughter-lover blue
Broad and true!
Sing the Slaughter-lover blue!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel!—O Steel!...
Battle where the savage Sword
Is sole Lord,—
Battle of the savage Sword!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel!—O Steel!...
O Sword! mighty King!
Battle-King!
O Sword! mighty King!...
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel!—O Steel!...
Let the Rainbow’s magic rays
Round thee blaze!—
Let the Rainbow round thee blaze!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel!—O Steel!
O Fire!—O Fire!
O Steel and Fire!
O Oak!—O Oak!
O Earth!—O Waves!
O Waves!—O Earth!
O Earth and Oak!
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1884.
Dear K.,—Charley Johnson’s coming down to spend a week with me. I shall be soon enjoying his Rabelaisian mirth, and his Gargantuesque laughter. He is going to Havana, and I shall ask him to get, if possible, the music of the erotic mime-dance,—the Zamacueca of the Creoles.
I see they are offering prizes for a good opera. Why don’t you compose an opera? I can suggest the most tremendous, colossal, Ragnarockian subject imaginable—knocks Wagner endwise and all the trilogies: “The Wooing of the Virgin of Poja,” from the “Kalewala.” The “Kalewala” is the only essentially musical epopea I know of. Orpheus is a mere clumsy charlatan to Wainamoinen and the wooers. The incidents are more charmingly enormous than anything in the Talmud, Ramayana, or Mahabharata. O! the old woman who talks to the Moon!—and the wicked singer who turns all that hear him to stone!—and the phantoms created by magical chant!—and the songs that make the stars totter in the frosty sky!—and the melodies that melt the gates of iron! And then, too, the episode of the Eternal Smith, by whose art the blue vault of heaven was wrought into shape; and the weird sleigh-ride over the Frozen Sea; and the words at whose utterance “the waters of the great deep lifted a thousand heads to listen!” And the story of the Earth-giant, aroused by magical force from his slumber of innumerable years, to teach to the Magician the runes by which all things are created,—the enchanted songs by which the Beginning was made to Begin. If you have not read it, try to get a prose translation: no poetical version can preserve the delightful goblinry and elfishness of the original, whereof the metre rings even as the ringing of a mighty harp.
I have also a delightful Malay poem which would make a much finer operatic subject or dramatic subject than the European féeries modelled upon the Hindoo drama of Sakuntala, or, as my French translator writes it, Sacountala. I have an inexhaustible quarry of monstrous and diabolical inspiration.
Yours truly, etc.
I spend whole days in vocal efforts—vain ones—to imitate those delicious arabesques about the Name of Allah in the Muezzin’s Song,—and do suddenly awake by night with a Voice in my ears, as of a Summons to Prayer. Bismillah!—enormous is God!
(Punishment No. 2)
Monograph upon the Music of the Witches’ Sabbath.
Dictionary of the Musical Instruments of all Nations.
With 50,000 wood engravings.
The Musical Legends of All Nations.
By H. Ed. Krehbiel and Lafcadio Hearn. Seven Vols. in 8vo, with 100 chromolithographs and 2000 eau-fortes. Price $300 per vol. 24th edition.
On the Howling Dervishes, and on the melodies of the six other orders of Dervishes. With music.
The Song of the Muezzin in All Moslem Countries. From Western Morocco to the Chinese Sea. Nine hundred different Notations of the Chant—with an Appendix treating of the Chant in the Oases and in the Soudan, as affected by African influence. Price $8000.
Dance-Music of the Ancient Occident, 1700 Ex.
Temple-Melodies of the Ancient and Modern World. Vol. I, China. Vol. II, India. Vol III, Rome. Vol. IV, Greece. Vol. V, Egypt, etc.
(To be continued.)
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—Please don’t let my importunacy urge you to write when you have little time and leisure. I only want to hear from you when it gives you pleasure and kills time. Never mind if I take a temporary notion to write every day—you know I don’t mean to be unreasonable.
Now, as I have your postal card I’ll cease the publication of my imaginary musical library, and will reserve that exquisite torture for some future occasion when I shall think you have treated me horribly. Just so soon as this beastly weather changes I’ll go to New York, and hope you’ll be able—say in April—to give me a few days’ loafing-time.
I’m afraid, however, I shall have to leave my Ideas behind me. I know I could never squeeze them under or over the Brooklyn Bridge. Furthermore, I’m afraid the Elevated R. R. cars might run over my Ideas and hurt them. In fact, ’t is only in the vast swamps of the South, where the converse of the frogs is even as the roar of a thousand waters, that my Ideas have room to expand.
Your banjo article delighted me,—of course, there is a great deal that is completely new to me therein. By the way, have you noticed the very curious looking harps of the Niam-Niams in Schweinfurth? They seem to me rather nearly related to the banjo in some respects. I am glad my little notes were of some use to you. I will take good care of the proof. Every time I see anything you’d like, I’ll send it on. The etymology of the banjo is a very interesting thing; perhaps I may find something fresh on the subject some day
Yours enthusiastically,
L. Hearn.
I know you would not care to hear about “the thousand different instruments to which the daughter of Pharaoh introduced King Solomon on the day he married her,” because the names of the instruments and the melodies which were performed upon them and the various chants to all the idols of Egypt which the daughter of Pharaoh taught Solomon are utterly forgotten. Yet, by the Kabbalistic rules of Gematria and Temurah might they not be exhumed?
In treatise Shekalim of Seder Mo’ed of the Talmud of Jerusalem it is related on the authority of Rabbi Aha, that Hogrus ben Levi, who directed the singing in the temple, “knew a vast number of melodies, and possessed a particular talent for modulating them in an agreeable voice. By thrusting his thumb into his mouth he produced many and various sorts of chants, so that his brethren, the Cohanim, were utterly amazed thereat.”
Hast read in Chap. XII of the Treatise Shabbat (Seder Mo’ed) concerning that lost Hebrew musical instrument, unlike any other instrument known in the history of mankind?...
TO H.E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, March, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I was quite glad to get your short letter, knowing how busy you are. Johnson changed his mind about Havana, as the season there has been very unhealthy; and for the time being I am disappointed in regard to the Spanish-Creole music. But it is only a question of a little while when I shall get it. I sent you the other day some Madagascar music. You will observe it is arranged for men and women alternately. By the way, speaking of the refrain, I think you ought to find it scientifically treated in Herbert Spencer’s “Sociology;” for in that giant summary of all human knowledge, everything relating to the arts of life is considered comparatively and historically. I have not got it: indeed I could not afford so immense a series as a mere work of reference, and life is too short. But you can easily refer to it in your public libraries. This reminds me of a curious fact I observed in reading Tylor—the similarity of an Australian song to a Greek chorus at Sparta,—at least, the construction thereof. You remember the lines, sung alternately by old men, young men, and boys:—
(Old Men) “We once were stalwart youths.”
(Young Men) “We are: if thou likest, test our strength.”
(Boys) “We shall be, and far better too!”
Now Tylor quotes this Australian chant:—
(Girls) “Kardang garro.”—Young-brother again.
(Old Women) “Manmal garro.”—Son again.
(Both together) “Mela nadjo Nunga broo.”—Hereafter I shall see never.
And it is also odd to find in Jeannest that in certain Congo tribes there is a superstition precisely like the Scandinavian superstition about the hell-shoon”—a strange coincidence in view of the fact that these negroes do not allow any save the king and the dead to wear shoes.
I am happy to have discovered a new work on the blacks of Senegambia—home of the Griots; and I expect it contains some Griot music. I have sent for it. It is quite a large volume. I am beginning to think it would be a pity to hurry our project. The subject is so vast, and so many new discoveries are daily being made, that I think we can afford to gain material by waiting. I believe we can pick up a great deal of queer African music this summer; and I feel convinced we ought to get specimens of West Indian Creole music.
I am afraid my imagination may have outstripped human knowledge in regard to negro physiology. You remember my suggestion about the possible differentia in the vocal chords of the two races. I feel more than ever convinced there is a remarkable difference. I heard a negro mother the other day calling her child’s name—a name of two syllables—Ella;—the first syllable was a low but very loud note, the second a very high sharp one, with a fractional note tied to its tail; and I don’t believe any white throat could have uttered that extraordinary sound with such rapidity and flexibility. The Australian Coo-eee was nothing to it! Well, I have been since studying Flower’s “Hunterian Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy of Man;” and I find that the science of comparative anatomy is scarcely yet well defined—what, then, can be said about the Comparative Physiology of Man? Nevertheless Flower is astonishing. He indicates extraordinary race-differences in the pelvic index—(the shape of the pelvis)—the length and proportion of the limbs, etc. I have been thinking of writing to him on the subject. Tell me,—do you approve of the idea?
I have also sent to Europe for some works on Oriental music
Your affectionate friend,
L.H.
Charley Johnson spent a week with me. He is the same old Charley. We had lots of fun and talk about old times. He was quite delighted with my library; nearly every volume of which is unfamiliar to ordinary readers. I have now nearly five hundred volumes—Egyptian, Assyrian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, etc., etc. Johnson seems to have become a rich man. The fact embarrassed me a little bit. Somehow or other, wealth makes a sort of Chinese wall between friends. One is afraid to be one’s self, or even to be as friendly as one would like toward somebody who is much better off. You know what I mean. Of course, I only speak of my private feelings; for Charley was just the same to me as in the old days.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, March, 1884.
My dear O’Connor,—What a delicious writer you are!—you do not know what pleasure your letter gave me, and how many novel combinations of ideas it evoked. I like your judgement of the Musée Secret; and yet ... I do not find it possible to persuade myself that the “mad excess of love” should not be indulged in by mankind. It is immemorial as you say;—Love was the creator of all the great thoughts and great deeds of men in all ages. I felt somewhat startled when I first read the earliest Aryan literature to find how little the human heart had changed in so many thousand years;—the women of the great Indian epics and lyrics are not less lovable than the ideal beauties of modern romance. All the great poems of the world are but so many necklaces of word-jewelry for the throat of the Venus Urania; and all history is illuminated by the Eternal Feminine, even as the world’s circle in Egyptian mythology is irradiated by Neith, curving her luminous woman’s body from horizon to horizon. And has not this “mad excess” sometimes served a good purpose? I like that legend of magnificent prostitution in Perron’s “Femmes Arabes,” according to which a battle was won and a vast nomad people saved from extinction by the action of the beauties of the tribe, who showed themselves unclad to the hesitating warriors and promised their embraces to the survivors,—of whom not over-many were left. Neither do I think that passion necessarily tends to enervate a people. There is an intimate relation between Strength, Health, and Beauty; they are ethnologically interlinked in one embrace,—like the Charities. I fancy the stout soldiers who followed Xenophon were far better judges of physical beauty than the voluptuaries of Corinth;—the greatest of the exploits of Heracles was surely an amorous one. I don’t like Bacon’s ideas about love: they should be adopted only by statesmen or others to whom it is a duty to remain passionless, lest some woman entice them to destruction. Has it not sometimes occurred to you that it is only in the senescent epoch of a nation’s life that love disappears?—there were no grand loves during the enormous debauch of which Rome died, nor in all that Byzantine orgy interrupted by the lightning of Moslem swords.... Again, after all, what else do we live for—ephemeræ that we are? Who was it that called life “a sudden light between two darknesses”? “Ye know not,” saith Krishna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, “either the moment of life’s beginning or the moment of its ending: only the middle may ye perceive.” It is even so: we are ephemeræ, seeking only the pleasure of a golden moment before passing out of the glow into the gloom. Would not Love make a very good religion? I doubt if mankind will ever cease to have faith—in the aggregate; but I fancy the era must come when the superior intelligences will ask themselves of what avail are the noblest heroisms and self-denials, since even the constellations are surely burning out, and all forms are destined to melt back into that infinite darkness of death and of life which is called by so many different names. Perhaps, too, all those myriads of suns are only golden swarms of ephemeræ of a larger growth and a larger day, whose movements of attraction are due to some “mad excess of love.”
The account your friend gave you of De Nerval’s suicide is precisely like the details of M. de Beaulieu’s picture exposed in 1859—and, I think, destroyed by the police for some unaccountable reason. It is described in Gautier’s “Histoire du Romantisme,” pp. 143-4 (note).... I am glad you notice my hand once in a while, and that you liked my De Nerval sketch and the “Women of the Sword.” You speak of magazine-work. I think the magazines are simply inabordables. My experiences have been disheartening. “Very good, very scholarly—but not the kind we want;”—“Highly interesting—sorry we have no room for it;”—“I regret to say we cannot use it, but would advise you to send it to X—;" "Deserves to be published; but unfortunately our rules exclude”—etc. I have an article now with the Atlantic—an essay upon the Adzan, or chant of the muezzin; its romantic history, etc. This has already been rejected by other leading magazines. Another horrible fact is that after your article is accepted, the editor rewrites it in his own way,—and then prints your name at the end of the so-created abomination. This is the plan of ——. I would like to see the ideal newspaper started we used to talk about: then we could write—eh?
So you think Doré’s Raven a failure! I hope you are not altogether right. I thought so when I first looked at the plates; but the longer I examined them, the more strongly they impressed me. There is ghostly power in several. What do you think of “The Night’s Plutonian Shore;” and the “Home by Horror haunted”? I must say that the terminal vignette with its Sphinx-death is one of the most terrible ideas I have ever seen drawn—although its force might be augmented by larger treatment. I would like to see it taken up by that French artist who painted that beautiful “Flight into Egypt,” where we see the Virgin and Child (in likeness of an Arab wanderer with her baby), slumbering between the awful granite limbs of the monster.
Your Gautier has just arrived. If you had sent me a little fortune you could not have pleased me so much. I never saw the photo before: it not only pleased, it excelled anticipation. You know our preconceived ideas of places we should like to visit and people we should like to know, usually excel the reality; but the head of Gautier seems to me grander than I imagined. One can almost hear him speak with that mellow, golden, organ-toned voice of his which Bergerat described; and I like that barbaric luxury of his attire,—there is something at once rich and strange about it, worthy some Khan of the Golden Horde.... I really feel quite enthusiastic about my new possession.
I am glad to hear you dislike Matthew Arnold. He seems to me one of the colossal humbugs of the century: a fifth-rate poet and unutterably dreary essayist;—a sort of philosophical hermaphrodite, yet lacking even the grace of the androgyne, because there is neither enough of positivism nor of idealism in his mental make-up to give real character to it. Don’t you think Edwin Arnold far the nobler man and writer? I love that beautiful enthusiasm of his for the beauties of strange faiths and exotic creeds. This is the spirit that, in some happier era, may bless mankind with a universal religion in perfect harmony with the truths of science and the better nature of humanity.
You ask about this climate. One who has lived by the sea and on the mountain-tops, as I have, must spend several years here to understand how this intertropical swamp-life affects the unacclimated. The first year one becomes very sick—fevers of unfamiliar character attack him; the appetite vanishes, the energies become enfeebled. The second summer one feels even worse. The third summer one can just endure without absolute sickness. The fourth, one begins to gain flesh and strength. But the blood has completely changed, the least breath of really cool air makes one shiver, and energy never becomes quite restored. After a few years in Louisiana, hard work becomes impossible. We are all lazy, enervated, compared with you Northerners. When my Northwestern friends come down here, it seems to me like a coming of Vikings and Berserkers; they are so full of life and blood and vital electricity! But when it is cold to me, it seems frightfully warm to them; and yet we used once to work together as reporters with the thermometer 20 below zero.
Sorry to say that Leloir died before completing the illustrations; and I suppose the subscribers to the edition will be the losers. It was to be issued in parts. Perhaps ten numbers were out. But I am not sure whether any of the engravings were printed. I based my error upon the critique of Leloir’s work in Le Livre. It is dangerous to anticipate!
I believe I have the very latest edition of W. W. [Walt Whitman]—1882 (Rees, Welsh & Co.), which I like very much. You did not quite understand my allusion to the Bible. I wished to imply that it was when W. W.’s verses approached that biblical metre in form, etc., that we most admired him. I agree with all you say about slang,—especially nautical slang; also about the grand irregularity of the wave-chant. Still I’ll have to write some examples of what I refer to, and will do so later.
Yours very warmly and gratefully,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, March, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I am sorry to be in such a hurry that I have to write a short letter; but I must signal my pleasure at seeing you coming out in public, and I have a vision of future greatness for you. As for myself, I trust I shall in a few years more obtain influence enough to be able to return some of your many kindnesses in a literary way. Eventually we may be able to pull together to a very bright goal, if I can keep my health.
I think that Osgood will announce the book about the 1st of April, but I am not sure. It would hardly do to anticipate. I send you his letter. The terms are not grand; but a big improvement on Worthington’s. Next time I hope I will be able to work to order. You can return letter when you are done with it, as it forms a part of my enormous collection of letters from publishers—(199 rejections to 1 acceptation).
I expect I shall have to postpone my visit until the book is out, as I must wait here to receive and correct proofs. I have dedicated the book to Page Baker, as it was entirely through his efforts that I got a hearing from Osgood. The reader had already rejected the MS. when Baker’s letter came.
From the Atlantic I have not yet heard. If I have good luck (which is extremely improbable) I would make the Muezzin No. 1 in a brief series of Arabesque studies, which would cost about two years’ labour—at intervals. I have several subjects in mind: for example, the lives of certain outrageous Moslem Saints, and a sketch of the mulatto and quadroon slave-poets of Arabia before Mahomet; “The Ravens,” as they were called from their color;—also the story of the Ye monnat, or those who died of love.... But these are beautiful dreams in embryo! Yours affectionately,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, March, 1884.
Postal-card.
... It is related by Philostratus in his life of Apollonius of Tyana, that when Apollonius visited India, and asked the Brahmins to give him an example of (musical) magic, the Brahmins did strip themselves naked and dance in a ring, each tapping the earth with a staff, and singing a strange hymn. Then the earth within the ring rose up, quivering, even as fermenting dough,—and rose higher,—and undulated and was lost in great waves,—and elevated the singers unto the height of two cubits....
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, April, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I read your leader with no small interest; and “the gruesome memories” were revived. The killing of the man in the Vine Street saloon, however, interested me most as a memory-reviving interest. That murderer was the most magnificent specimen of athletic manhood that I ever saw,—I suspect he was a gipsy; for he had all the characteristics of that race, and was not a regular circus-employee,—only a professional rider, now with one company, now with another. Did you see him when you were there? He was perhaps 6 feet 4; for his head nearly touched the top of the cell. He had a very regular handsome face, with immense black eyes; and an Oriental sort of profile:—then he seemed slender, in spite of his immense force,—such was the proportion of his figure. A cynical devil, too. I went to see him with the coroner, who showed him the piece of the dead man’s skull. He took it between his fingers, held it up to the light, handed it back to the coroner and observed; “Christ!—he must have had a d—d rotten skull.” He was ordered to leave town within twenty-four hours as a dangerous character. It is a pity such men should be vulgar murderers and ruffians;—what superb troopers they would make! I shall never forget that splendid stature and strength as long as I live....
I don’t know whether I shall ever be living in that terrible metropolis of yours. It will be impossible for me ever again to write or read by night; and hard work has become impossible. If I could ever acquire reputation enough to secure a literary position on some monthly or weekly periodical where I could take it easy, perhaps I might feel like enduring the hideous winters. But I am just now greatly troubled by the question, What shall I work for?—to what special purpose? Perhaps some good fortune may come when least expected.
Now I want to talk about our trip. I think it better not to go now. Page wants me to take a good big vacation this summer,—a long one. If I wait till it gets warm, I will be able to escape the feverish month; and if you should be in Cincinnati at the Festival, or elsewhere, I would meet you anyhow or anywhere you say. Were I to leave now I could not do so later; and I am waiting for some curious books and things which I want to bring you so that we can analyze them together. A month or so won’t make much difference.
Will write you soon. Had to quit work for a few days on account of eye-trouble
Yours very truly,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, May, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I have been so busy that I have not been able to answer your last. They are sending me proofs at the rate of twenty pages a day; and you can imagine this keeps me occupied in addition to my other work. Alas! I find that nothing written for a newspaper—at least for an American newspaper—can be perfect. My poor little book will show some journalistic weaknesses—will contain some hasty phrases or redundancies or something else which will mar it. I try my best to get it straight; but the consequences of hasty labour are perpetually before me, notwithstanding the fact that the collocation of the material occupied nearly two years. I am thinking of Bayard Taylor’s terrible observation about American newspaper-work. It seems to be generally true. Still there are some who write with extraordinary precision and correctness. I think you are one of them.
What troubles my style especially is ornamentation. An ornamental style must be perfect or full of atrocious discords and incongruities; and perfect ornamentation requires slow artistic work—except in the case of men like Gautier, who never re-read a page, or worried himself about a proof. But I think I’ll improve as I grow older.
I won’t be away till June. Then I’ll have some queer books in my satchel, and we’ll talk the book over. I fear it is no use to discuss it beforehand, as I shall be overwhelmed with work. Another volume of the Talmud has come, and some books about music containing Chinese hymns. By the way, in Spencer’s last volume there is an essay on musical origination. I have had only time to glance at it. Your Creole music lecture cannot fail to be extremely curious; wish I could hear and see it. The melodies will certainly make a sensation if you have a good assortment. Did you borrow anything from Gottschalk?—I hope you did: the Bamboula used to drive the Parisians wild.
Thanks for the musical transcription. I’m afraid the project won’t pan out, however. Trübner & Co. of London made an offer, but wanted me to guarantee the American sale of 100 copies—that means pay in advance. I would not perhaps have objected, if they had mentioned a low price; but when I tried to get them to come down to about 5s. per copy they did not write me any more.
Then I abandoned the pursuit of the Ignis Fatuus of Success, and withdrew into the Immensities and the Eternities, even as the rhinoceros withdraweth into the recesses of the jungle. And I gave myself up to the meditation of the Vedas and of the Puranas and of the Upanishads, and of the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead,—until the memory of magazines and of publishers faded out of my mind, even as the vision of demons
Yours very truly,
L. Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, May, 1884.
My dear O’Connor,—I did not get time until to-day to drop you a line; and just at present I am enthusiastically appreciating your observations regarding The Foul Fiend Routine. I wish I could escape from his brazen grip; and nevertheless he has done me service. He has stifled my younger and more foolish aspirations, and clipped the foolish wings of my earlier ambition with the sharp scissors of revision. It is true that I now regret my inability to achieve literary independence; but had I obtained a market for my wares in other years, I should certainly have been so ashamed of them by this time, that I should fly to some desert island. These meditations follow upon the incineration of several hundred pages of absurdities written some years back, and just committed to the holy purification of fire....
I am not, however, sorry for writing the fantastic ideas about love which you so thoroughly exploded in your letter; they “drew you out,” and I wanted to hear your views. I suppose, however, that the mad excess is indulged in by every nation at a certain period of existence—perhaps the Senescent Epoch, as Draper calls it. What a curious article might be written upon “The Amorous Epochs of National Literatures,”—or something of that sort; dwelling especially upon the extravagant passionateness of Indian, Persian, and Arabic belles-lettres,—and their offshoots! Not to bore you further with theories, however, I herewith submit another specimen of excess from the posthumous poetry of Gautier. It has been compared to those Florentine statuettes, which are kept in shagreen cases, and only exhibited, whisperingly, by antiquaries to each other....
There is real marmorean beauty in the lines,—their sculpturesqueness saves them from lewdness. I think them more beautiful than Solomon’s simile, or the extravagances of the Gita-Govinda.
June 29.
You see how busy I have been. And my brain seems so full of dust and hot sun and feverish vapours that it is hard to write at all.... I am thinking of what you said about Arnold’s translating the Koran. There are two English translations besides Sale’s—one in Trübner’s Oriental Series, and one in Max Müller’s “Sacred Books of the East” (Macmillan’s beautiful edition). Sale’s is chiefly objectionable because the suras are not versified: the chapters not having been so divided in early times by figures. But it is horribly hard to find anything in it. The French have two superb versions: Kazimirski and La Beaume. Kazimirski is popular and cheap; the other is an analytical Koran of 800 4to pp. with concordance, and designed for the use of the Government bureaux in Algeria. I have it. It is unrivalled.
My book is out; and you will receive a copy soon. If you ever have time, please tell me if there is anything in it you like. It is not a gorgeous production,—only an experiment. I have a great plan in view: to popularize the legends of Islam and other strange faiths in a series of books. My next effort will be altogether Arabesque—treating of Moslem saints, singers, and poets, and hagiographical curiosities—eschewing such subjects as the pilgrimage to the ribath (monastery) of Deir-el-Tiu in the Hedjaz, where fragments of the broken aidana of Mahomet are kissed by the faithful....
I’m sorry to say I know little of Bacon except his Essays. Those surprised and pleased me. I started to read them only as a study of Old English; but soon found the ideas far beyond the century in which they were penned. You will be shocked, I fear, to know that I am terribly ignorant of classic English literature,—of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Not having studied it much when at college, I now find life too short to study it,—except for style. When I want to clear mine,—as coffee is cleared by the white of an egg,—I pour a little quaint English into my brain-cup, and the Oriental extravagances are gradually precipitated. But I think a man must devote himself to one thing in order to succeed: so I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits my temperament. For example, my memories of early Roman history have become cloudy, because the Republic did not greatly interest me; but very vivid are my conceptions of the Augustan era, and great my delight with those writers who tell us how Hadrian almost realized that impossible dream of modern æsthetes, the resurrection of Greek art. The history of modern Germany and Scandinavia I know nothing about; but I know the Eddas and the Sagas, and the chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of Vikings and Berserks,—because these were mighty and awesomely grand. The history of Russia pleaseth me not at all, with the exception of such extraordinary episodes as the Dimitris; but I could never forget the story of Genghis Khan, and the nomad chiefs who led 1,500,000 horsemen to battle. Enormous and lurid facts are certainly worthy of more artistic study than they generally receive. What De Quincey told us in his “Flight of a Tartar Tribe” previous writers thought fit to make mere mention of.... But I’m rambling again.
I don’t know whether I shall be able to go North as I hoped—I have so much private study before me. But I do really hope to see you some day. Couldn’t you get down to our Exposition?...
Did you ever read Symonds’s “Greek Poets”? The final chapters on the genius of Greek art are simply divine. I mention them because of your observation about our being or not being ephemeral. I feel fearful we are. But Symonds says what I would have liked to say, so much better, that I would like to let him speak for me with voice of gold.
Very truly your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H.E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, June, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I’m expecting every day to get some Griot music and some queer things, and have discovered an essay upon just the subject of subjects that interests Us:—the effect of physiological influences upon the history of nations, and “the physiological character of races in their relation to historical events.” Wouldn’t it be fine if we could write a scientific essay on Polynesian music in its manifestations of the physiological peculiarities of the island-races? Nothing would give me so much pleasure as to be able some day to write a most startling and stupefying preface to some treatise of yours upon exotic music—a preface nevertheless strictly scientific and correct. By the way, have you any information about Eskimo music? If you have, tell me when I see you. I have some singular songs with a double-refrain,—but no music,—which I found in Rink. Why the devil didn’t Rink give us some melodies?
I am especially interested just now in Arabic subjects; but as I am following the Arabs into India, I find myself studying the songs of the bayaderes. They are very strange, and sometimes very pretty—sweetly pretty. Maisonneuve promised to publish some of this Indian music; but that was in ’81, and we haven’t got it yet. I have found curious titles in Trübner’s collection; but I’m afraid the music isn’t published—“Folk-Songs of Southern India,” etc.
I want you to tell me how long you will stay in New York, as I would like to go there soon. The vacations are beginning. Don’t fail to keep me posted as to your movements. How did you like the sonorous cry of the bel-balancier man?
Am writing in haste; excuse everything excusable
Yours affectionately,
L. Hearn.
A man ignorant of music is likely to say silly things without knowing it when writing to a professor; so you must excuse my faults on the ground of good will to you. I have just destroyed two pages which I thought might be waste of time to read.
TO H.E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, June, 1884.
Dear K.,—I want you to let me hear about old Bìlâl for the following reasons:—
1. I have discovered that a biography of him—the only one in existence probably—-may be found in Wüstenfeld’s “Nawawi,” for which I have written. If the text is German I can utilize it with the aid of a bouquiniste here.
2. I have been lucky enough to engage a copy of Ibn Khallikan in 24 volumes—the great Arabic biographer. It containeth legends. The book is dear but invaluable to an Oriental student,—especially to me in the creation of my new volume, which will be all Arabesques.
And here is another bit of news for you. My Senegal books have thrown a torrent of light on the whole history of American slave-songs and superstitions and folk-lore. I was utterly astounded at the revelation. All that had previously seemed obscure is now lucid as day. Of course, you know the slaves were chiefly drawn from the West Coast; and the study of ethnography and ethnology of the West Coast races is absolutely essential to a knowledge of Africanism in America. As yet, however, I have but partly digested my new meal.
Siempre á V.,
Lafcadio Hearn.
New Orleans, June, 1884.
Dear K.,—Your letter has given me unspeakable pleasure. In making the acquaintance of Howells, you have met the subtlest and noblest literary mind in this country,—scarcely excepting that prince of critics, Stedman; and you have found a friend who will aid you in climbing Parnassus, not for selfish motives, but for pure art’s sake. Cultivate him all you can....
I got a nice letter from Ticknor. He actually promises to open the magazine-gates for me. And a curious coincidence is that the book is published on my birthday, next Friday.
I will write you before I start for New York in a few weeks more....
I will bring my African books with me, and other things.
Yours sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, October, 1884.
Dear Krehbiel,—I sit down to write you the first time I have had leisure to do justice to the subject for a month.
Now I must tell you what I am doing. I have been away a good deal, in the Creole archipelagoes of the Gulf, and will soon be off again, to make more studies for my little book of sketches. I sent you the No. 2, as a sample. These I take as much pains with as with magazine work, and the plan is philosophical and pantheistic. Did you see “Torn Letters,”—(No. 1) about the Biscayena. The facts are not wholly true; I was very nearly in love—not quite sure whether I am not a little in love still,—but I never told her so. It is so strange to find one’s self face to face with a beauty that existed in the Tertiary epoch,—300,000 years ago,—the beauty of the most ancient branch of humanity,—the oldest of the world’s races! But the coasts here are just as I described them, without exaggeration,—and I am so enamoured of those islands and tepid seas that I would like to live there forever, and realize Tennyson’s wish:—
“I will wed some savage woman; she shall rear my dusky race: Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,— Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun, Whistle back the parrot’s call,—leap the rainbows of the brooks,— Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.”
The islanders found I had one claim to physical superiority anyhow,—I could outswim the best of them with the greatest ease. And I have disciplined myself physically so well of late years, that I am no longer the puny little fellow you used to know.
All this is sufficiently egotistical. I just wanted, however, to tell you of my wanderings and their purpose. It was largely inspired by the new style of Pierre Loti—that young marine officer who is certainly the most original of living French novelists.
All this summer Page could not get away; so you will not have the pleasure of seeing my very noble and lovable friend,—a tall, fine, eagle-faced fellow, primitive Aryan type. I only got away on the pledge to give the results to the T.-D., which is giving me all possible assistance in my literary undertakings.
I was glad to receive Creole books, as I am working on Creole subjects. Several new volumes have appeared. I have some Oriental things to send you—music, if you will agree to return in one month from reception. But you need not have expressed those other things—made me feel sorry. I expressed them to you for other reasons entirely.
I have a delightful Mexican friend living with me, and teaching me to speak Spanish with that long, soft, languid South American Creole accent that is so much more pleasant than the harsher accent of Spain. His name is José de Jesus y Preciado, and he sends you his best wishes, because he says all my friends must be his friends too.
Now, I hope you’ll write me a pretty, kind, forgiving letter,—not condescendingly, but really nice,—you know what I mean.
Your supersensitive and highly suspicious friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, January, 1885.
Dear Friend Krehbiel,—Many, many happy New Years. Your letter came luckily during an interval of rest,—so that I can answer it right away. I have not been at all worried by your silence,—as your former kind lines showed me you had fully forgiven my involuntary injustice and my voluntary, but only momentary malice. (Please give this last the French accent, which takes off the edge of the word.)
In a few days my Creole Dictionary will be published in New York; and I will not forget to send you a copy, just as soon as I can get some myself. I do not expect to make anything on the publication. It is a give-away to a friend, who will not forget me if he makes money, but who does not expect to make a fortune on it. This kind of thing is never lucrative; and the publication of the book is justified only by Exposition projects. As for the “Stray Leaves” I have never written to the publishers yet about them,—so afraid of bad news I have been. But I have dared to try and get a good word said for it in high places. I succeeded in obtaining a personal letter from Protap Chunder Roy, of Calcutta, and hope to get one from Edwin Arnold. This is cheeky; but publishers think so much about a commendation from some acknowledged authority in Oriental studies.
The prices are high; the markets are all “bulled;” and for the first time I find my room rent here (twenty dollars per month) and my salary scarcely enough for my extravagant way of life. Money is a subject I am beginning to think of in connection with everything except—art. I still think nobody should follow an art purpose with money in view; but if no money comes in time, it is discouraging in this way,—that the lack of public notice is generally somewhat of a bad sign. Happily, however, I have joined a building association, which compels me to pay out $20 per month. Outside of this way of saving, I save nothing,—except queer books imported from all parts of the world.
Very affectionately yours,
Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL.
New Orleans, January, 1885.
My dear Krehbiel,—I fear I know nothing about Creole music or Creole negroes. Yes, I have seen them dance; but they danced the Congo, and sang a purely African song to the accompaniment of a dry-goods box beaten with sticks or bones and a drum made by stretching a skin over a flour-barrel. That sort of accompaniment and that sort of music, you know all about: it is precisely similar to what a score of travellers have described. There are no harmonies—only a furious contretemps. As for the dance,—in which the women do not take their feet off the ground,—it is as lascivious as is possible. The men dance very differently, like savages, leaping in the air. I spoke of this spectacle in my short article in the Century.
One must visit the Creole parishes to discover the characteristics of the real Creole music, I suspect. I would refer the Century to Harris’s book: he says the Southern darkies don’t use the banjo. I have never seen any play it here but Virginians or “upper country” darkies. The slave-songs you refer to are infinitely more interesting than anything Cable’s got; but still, I fancy his material could be worked over into something really pretty. Gottschalk found the theme for his Bamboula in Louisiana—Quand patate est chinte, etc., and made a miracle out of it.
Now if you want any further detailed account of the Congo dance, I can send it; but I doubt whether you need it. The Creole songs, which I have heard sung in the city, are Frenchy in construction, but possess a few African characteristics of method. The darker the singer the more marked the oddities of intonation. Unfortunately most of those I have heard were quadroons or mulattoes. One black woman sang me a Voudoo song, which I got Cable to write—but I could not sing it as she sang it, so that the music is faulty. I suppose you have seen it already, as it forms part of the collection. If the Century people have any sense they would send you down here for some months next spring to study up the old ballads; and I believe that if you manage to show Cable the importance of the result, he can easily arrange it....
You answered some of my questions charmingly. Don’t be too sarcastic about my capacity for study. My study is of an humble sort; and I never knew anything, and never shall, about acoustics. But I have had to study awful hard in order to get a vague general idea of those sciences which can be studied without mathematics, or actual experimentation with mechanical apparatus. I have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest some day. Wouldn’t I make an imposing Doctor in the Country of Cowboys? A doctor might also do well in Japan. I’m thinking seriously about it.
This is the best letter I can write for the present, and I know it’s not a good one. I send a curiosity by Xp to you.
The Creole slaves sang usually with clapping of hands. But it would take an old planter to give reliable information regarding the accompaniment.
Yours very truly,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1885.
Dear Krehbiel,—I regret having been so pressed for time that I was obliged to return your MS. without a letter expressing the thanks which you know I feel. I scribbled in pencil—which you can erase with a bit of bread—some notes on the Cajan song, that may interest you.
The Harpers are giving me warm encouragement; but advise me to remain a fixture where I am. They say they are looking now to the South for literary work of a certain sort,—that immense fields for observation remain here wholly untilled, and that they want active, living, opportune work of a fresh kind. I shall try soon my hand at fiction;—my great difficulty is my introspective disposition, which leaves me in revery at moments when I ought to be using eyes, ears, and tongue in studying others rather than my own thoughts.
I find the word Banja given as African in Bryan Edwards’s “West Indies.” My studies of African survivals have tempted me to the purchase of a great many queer books which will come in useful some day. Most are unfortunately devoted to Senegal; for our English travellers are generally poor ethnographers and anthropologists, so far as the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast are concerned. You remember our correspondence about the comparative anatomy of the vocal organs of negroes and whites. A warm friend of several years’ standing—a young Spanish physician and professor here—is greatly interested in this new science: indeed we study comparative human anatomy and ethnology in common, with goniometers and Broca’s instruments. He states that only microscopic work can reveal the full details of differentiation in the vocal organs of races; but calls my attention to several differences already noticed. Gibb has proved, for instance, that the cartilages of Wrisberg are larger in the negro;—this would not affect the voice especially; but the fact promises revelations of a more important kind. We think of your projects in connection with these studies.
I copied only your Acadian boat-song. What is the price of the slave-song book? If you have time to send me during the next month the music of “Michié Preval,” and of the boat-song, I can use them admirably in xml:lang="fr">Mélusine....
Your friend,
L. H.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, March, 1885.
Big P. S. No. 1.
I forgot in my hurried letter yesterday, to tell you that if you ever want a copy of “Stray Leaves,” don’t go and buy it, as you have been naughty enough to do, but tell me, and I’ll send you what you wish. I hope to dedicate a book to you some day, when I am sure it is worth dedicating to you.
I am quite curious about you. Seems to me you must be like your handwriting,—firmly knit, large, strong, and keen;—with delicate perceptions, (of course I know that, anyhow!) well-developed ideas of order and system, and great continuity of purpose and a disposition as level and even as the hand you write. If my little scraggy hand tells you anything, you ought to recognize in it a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, variable, nervous disposition,—almost exactly your antitype in everything—except the love of the beautiful.
Very faithfully,
L. H.
Big P. S. No. 2.
I did not depend on Le Figaro for statements about Hugo; but picked them up in all directions. What think you of his refusal to aid poor blind Xavier Aubryet by writing a few lines of preface for his book? What about his ignoring the services of his greatest champion, Théophile Gautier? What about his studied silence in regard to the works of the struggling poets and novelists of the movement which he himself inaugurated? I really believe that the man has been a colossus of selfishness. One who prejudiced me very strongly against him, however, was that eccentric little Jew, Alexander Weill, whose reminiscences of Heine made such a sensation. Perhaps after all literary generosity is rare. Flaubert and Gautier possessed it; but twenty cases of the opposite kind, quite as illustrious, may be cited. In any event I am glad of your rebuke. Whether my ideas are right or wrong, I believe we ought not to speak of the weaknesses of truly great men when it can be avoided;—therefore I cry peccavi, and promise to do so no more.
Yours very sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
MR. HEARN’S EARLIER HANDWRITING
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1885.
Dear Krehbiel,—I have been away in Florida, in the track of old Ponce de Leon,—bathing in the Fount of Youth,—talking to the palm-trees,—swimming in the great Atlantic surf. Charley Johnson and I took the trip together,—or to be strictly fair, it was he that induced me to go along; and I am not sorry for the expense or the time spent, as I enjoyed my reveries unspeakably. For bathing—sea-bathing—I prefer our own Creole islands in the Gulf to any place in Florida; but for scenery and sunlight and air,—air that is a liquid jewel,—Florida seems to me the garden of Hesperus. I’ll send you what I have written about it....
Charles Dudley Warner, whose acquaintance made here, strikes me as the nicest literary personage I have yet met.... Gilder of the Century was here—a handsome, kindly man.... A book which I recently got would interest you—Symonds’s “Wine, Women, and Song.” I had no idea that the Twelfth Century had its literary renascence, or that in the time of the Crusades German students were writing worthy of Horace and Anacreon. The Middle Ages no longer seem so Doresquely black
Your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1885.
My dear Ball,—I regret my long silence, now broken with the sincere pleasure of being able to congratulate you upon a grand success and still grander opportunities. The salary you are promised is nearly double that obtained by the best journalist in the country (excepting one or two men in highly responsible positions of managers); it far exceeds the average earnings of expert members of the higher professions; and there are not many authors in the United States who can rely upon such an income. So that you have a fine chance to accumulate a nice capital, as well as ample means to indulge scholarly tastes and large leisure to gratify them. I feared, sensitive as you are, to weigh too heavily upon one point before, but I think I shall not hesitate to do so now. I refer to the question of literary effort. Again I would say: Leave all profane writing alone for at least five years more; and devote all your talent, study, sense of beauty, force of utterance to your ministerial work. You will make an impression, and be able to rise higher and higher. In the meanwhile you will be able to mature your style, your thought, your scholarship; and when the proper time comes be able also to make a sterling, good, literary effort. What we imagine new when we are young is apt really to be very old; and that which appears to us very old suddenly grows youthful at a later day with the youth of Truth’s immortality. None, except one of those genii, who appear at intervals as broad as those elapsing in Indian myth between the apparition of the Buddhas, can sit down before the age of thirty-five or forty, and create anything really great. Again the maxim, “Money is power,”—commonplace and vulgar though it be,—has a depth you will scarcely appreciate until a later day. It is power for good, quite as much as for evil; and “nothing succeeds like success,” you know. Once you occupy a great place in the great religious world of wealth and elegance and beauty, you will find yourself possessed of an influence that will enable you to realize any ambition which inspires you. This is the best answer I can now give to your last request for a little friendly counsel, and it is uttered only because I feel that being older than you, and having been knocked considerably about the world, I can venture to offer the results of my little experience.
As you say, you are drawing nearer to me. I expect we shall meet, and be glad of the meeting. I shall have little to show you except books, but we will have a splendid time for all that. Meanwhile I regret having nothing good to send you. The story appeared in Harper’s Bazar.
Sincerely your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, July, 1885.
My dear Ball,—Your welcome letter came to me just at a happy moment when I had time to reply. I would have written before, but for a protracted illness. I am passionately fond of swimming; and the clear waters of that Florida spring seduced me into a plunge while very hot. The water was cold as death; and when I got back to New Orleans, I had the novel experience of a Florida fever,—slow, torpid, and unconquerable by quinine. Now I am all right.
The language of “Stray Leaves” is all my own, with the exception of the Italic texts and a few pages translated from the “Kalewala.” The Florida sketch I sent you, although published in a newspaper, is one of a number I have prepared for the little volume of impressions I told you about. I sent it as an illustration of the literary theory discussed in our previous correspondence, which I am surprised you remember so well.
Apropos of your previous letter, I must observe that I do not like James Freeman Clarke’s work,—immense labour whose results are nullified by a purely sectarian purpose. Mr. Clarke sat down to study with the preconceived purpose of belittling other beliefs by comparison with Christianity,—a process quite as irrational and narrow as would be an attempt in the opposite direction. My very humble studies in comparative mythology led me to a totally different conclusion,—revealing to me a universal aspiration of mankind toward the Infinite and Supreme, so mighty, so deeply sincere, so touching, that I have ceased to perceive the least absurdity in any general idea of worship, whether fetish or monotheistic, whether the thought of the child man or the dream of hoary Indian philosophy. Nor can I for the same reason necessarily 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,—symbolizing at once creation and destruction,—the Great Begetter and the Universal Putrifier.
A noble and excellently conceived address that of yours on Thos. Paine,—bolder than I thought your congregation was prepared for. Yes, I certainly think you are going to effect a great deal in a good cause, the cause of mental generosity and intellectual freedom. I almost envy you sometimes your opportunities as a great teacher, a social emancipator, and I feel sure what you have already done is nothing to be compared with what you will do, providing you retain health and strength.
I don’t know just what to say about your literary articles; but I can speak to the editor-in-chief, who is my warm personal friend. The only difficulty would be the bigotry here. Even my editorials upon Sanscrit literature called out abuse of the paper from various N. O. pulpits, as "A Buddhist Newspaper,” an “Infidel sheet,” etc. If published first in the Boston paper, I could get the lecture reproduced, I think, in ours. If you expect remuneration you would have to send the MS. first to us and take the chances. I think what you best do in the interim would be to write on the subject to Page M. Baker, Editor T.-D., mentioning my name, and await reply.
You asked me in a former letter a question I forgot to answer. I have no photograph at present, but will have some taken soon and will send you one.
Very sincerely yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1885.
Dear Ball,—I regret extremely my long delay in writing you—due partly to travel, partly to work, for I have considerable extra work to do for the Harpers, and for myself. You ask me about literary ventures. I suppose you have seen the little book Osgood published for me last summer—“Stray Leaves from Strange Literature,” a volume of Oriental stories. Since then I have had nothing printed except a dictionary of Creole proverbs which could scarcely interest you,—and some Oriental essays, which appeared in newspapers only, but which I hope to collect and edit in permanent form next year. Meantime I am working upon a little book of personal impressions, which I expect to finish this summer. Of course I will keep the story you want for you, and mail it; and if you have not seen my other book I will send it you.
Your project about a correspondence is pleasant enough; but I am now simply overwhelmed with work, which has been accumulating during a short absence in Florida. In any event, however, I do not quite see how this thing could prove profitable. I doubt very much if Christ is not a myth, just as Buddha is. There may have been a teacher called Jesus, and there may have been a teacher Siddartha; but the mythological and philosophical systems attached to these names have a far older origin, and represent only the evolution of human ideas from the simple and primitive to the complex form. As the legend of Buddha is now known to have been only the development of an ancient Aryan sun-myth, so probably the legend of Jesus might be traced to the beliefs of primitive and pastoral humanity. What matter creeds, myths, traditions, to you or me, who perceive in all faiths one vast truth,—one phase of the Universal Life? Why trouble ourselves about detailed comparisons while we know there is an Infinite which all thinkers are striving vainly to reach by different ways, and an Infinite invisible of which all things visible are but emanations? Worlds are but dreams of God, and evanescent; the galaxies of suns burn out, the heavens wither; even time and space are only relative; and the civilization of a planet but an incident of its growth. To those who feel these things religious questions are valueless and void of meaning, except in their relation to the development of ethical ideas in general. And their study in this light is too large for the compass of a busy life
In haste, your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
I read your sermon with pleasure and gave a copy to our editor-in-chief.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, July, 1885.
My dear O’Connor,—Your kind little surprise came to me while I was very ill, and, I believe, helped me to get better; for everything which cheers one during an attack of swamp-fever aids convalescence. As you know, I made a sojourn in East Florida; and I exposed myself a good deal, in the pursuit of impressions. The wonderful water especially tempted me. I am a good swimmer, and always crazy to enjoy a dive, so I yielded to the seduction of Silver Spring. It was a very hot day; but the flood was cold as the grip of old Death. I didn’t feel the effect right away; but when I got back home found I had a fever that quinine would take no effect upon. Now I am getting all right, and will be off to the sea soon to recruit.
Well, I thought I would wait to write until I could introduce myself to you, as you so delicately divined that I wanted you to do to me; but I delayed much longer than I wished or intended. Photographs are usually surprises;—your face was not exactly what I had imagined, but it pleased me more—I had fancied you a little stern, very dark, with black eyes,—partly, perhaps, because others of your name whom I knew had that purplish black hair and eyes which seems a special race-characteristic,—partly perhaps from some fantastic little idea evolved by the effort to create a person from a chirography, as though handwriting constituted a sort of track by which individuality could be recognized. I know now that I should feel a little less timid in meeting you; for I seem to know you already very well,—for a long time,—intimately and without mystery.
I send a couple of little clippings which may interest you for the moment,—one, a memory of Saint Augustine; the other, a translation which, though clumsy, preserves something of a great poet’s weird fancy.
I am sorry that I have so little to tell you in a literary way. As you seem to see the T.-D. very often, you watch me tolerably closely, I suppose. I have been trying to complete a little volume of impressions, but the work drags on very, very slowly: I fear I shan’t finish it before winter. Then I have a little Chinese story accepted for Harper’s Bazar, which I will send you, and which I think you will like. Otherwise my plans have changed. With the expansion of my private study, I feel convinced that I know too little to attempt anything like a serious volume of Oriental essays; but my researches have given me a larger fancy in some directions, and new colours, which I can use hereafter. Fiction seems to be the only certain road to the publishers’ hearts, and I shall try it, not in a lengthy, but a brief compass,—striving as much as possible after intense effects. I think you would like my library if you could see it,—it is one agglomeration of exotics and eccentricities.
And you do not now write much?—do you? I would like to have read the paper you told me of; but I fear the Manhattan is dead beyond resurrection—and, by the way, Richard Grant White has departed to that land which is ruled by absolute silence, and in which a law of fair play, unrecognized by our publishers, doth prevail. Do you never take a vacation? If you could visit our Grande Isle in the healthy season, you would enjoy it so much! An old-fashioned, drowsy, free-and-easy Creole watering-place in the Gulf,—where there is an admirable beach, fishing extraordinary, and subjects innumerable for artistic studies—a hybrid population from all the ends of heaven, white, yellow, red, brown, cinnamon-colour, and tints of bronze and gold. Basques, Andalusians, Portuguese, Malays, Chinamen, etc. I hope to make some pen drawings there.
Have you seen the revised Old Testament? How many of our favourite and beautiful texts have been marred! I almost prefer the oddity of Wickliffe.... And, by the way, I must tell you that Palmer’s Koran is a fine book! (“Sacred Books of the East,” Macmillan.) Sale is now practically obsolete.
Hoping I will be able, one of these days, to write something that I can worthily dedicate to you,
Believe me
Very affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, October, 1885.
Dear Krehbiel,—I would suggest as a title for Tunison’s admirably conceived book, “The Legends of Virgil,” or, better still, “The Virgilian Legend” (in the singular), as it is the custom among folklorists to assemble a class of interrelated myths or fables under such a general head. Thus we have “The Legend of Mélusine, or Mère Lusine;” “The Legend of Myrrdlium, or Merlin;” “The Legend of Don Juan”—although each subject represents a large number of myths, illustrating the evolutional history of one idea through centuries. This title could be supplemented by an explanatory sub-title.
Of course you can rely on me to praise, sincerely and strongly, what I cannot but admire and honourably envy the authorship of. I wish I could even hope to do so fine a piece of serious work as this promises to be.
I am exceedingly grateful for your prompt sending of the Creole songs, which I will return in a day or two. Some Creole music of an inedited kind—just one or two fragments—I would like so as to introduce your rôle well. I now fear, however, that I shall not be able to devote as much time to the work as I hoped.
As for my “thinkings, doings, and ambitions,” I have nothing interesting to tell. I have accumulated a library worth $2000; I have studied a great deal in directions which have not yet led me to any definite goal; I have made no money by my literary outside work worth talking about; and I have become considerably disgusted with what I have already done. But I have not yet abandoned the idea of evolutional fiction, and find that my ethnographic and anthropologic reading has enabled me to find a totally new charm in character-analysis, and suggested artistic effects of a new and peculiar description. I dream of a novel, or a novelette, to be constructed upon totally novel principles; but the outlook is not encouraging. Years of very hard work with a problematical result! I feel pretty much like a scholar trying hard to graduate and feeling tolerably uneasy about the result.
Since you have more time now you might drop a line occasionally. I hope to hear you succeed with the Scribners;—if not, I would strongly recommend an effort with Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the most appreciative publishers on this side of the Atlantic
Yours very affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1885.
Dear K.,—I was in hopes by this time to have been able to have sent you for examination a little volume by La Selve, in which a curious account is given of the various negro-creole dances and songs of the Antilles. The book has been ordered for a very considerable time, but owing to some cause or other, its arrival has been delayed.
I find references made to Duveyrier (Les Touaregs du Nord) in regard to the music of those extraordinary desert nomads, who retain their blue eyes and blonde hair under the sun of the Timbuctoo country; and to Endemann (by Hartmann) as a preserver of the music of the Basutos (South Africa). Hartmann himself considers African music—superficially, perhaps, in the smaller volume—in his “Peuples d’Afrique;” and in his “Nigritiens” (Berlin: in 2 vols.). I have the small work (“Peuples d’Afrique”) which forms part of the French International Scientific Series, but has not been translated for the American collection. Hartmann speaks well of the musical “aptitudes” of the African races, while declaring their art undeveloped; and he even says that the famous Egyptian music of Dendera, Edfu, and Thebes never rose above the orchestration at an Ashantee or Monbuttoo festival. He even remarks that the instruments of the ancient Egyptian and modern Nigritian peoples are almost similar. He also refers to the negro talents for improvisation, and their peculiar love of animal-fables—the same, no doubt, which found a new utterance in the negro myths of the South. The large work of Hartmann I have never seen, and as it is partly chromolithographed I fear it is very expensive. The names Hartmann and Endemann are very German: I know of the former only through French sources,—perhaps you have seen the original. He supports some of his views with quotations you are familiar with perhaps—from Clapperton, Bowdich, and Schweinfurth.
It is rather provoking that I have not been able to find any specimens of Griot music referred to in French works on Senegal; and I fancy the Griot music would strongly resemble (in its suitability to improvisation especially) the early music of the negroes here. Every French writer on Senegal has something to say about the Griots, but none seem to have known enough music to preserve a chant. The last two works published (Jeannest’s “Au Congo” and Marche’s “Afrique Occidentale”) were written by men without music in their souls. The first publishes pictures of musical instruments, but no music; and the second gives ten lines to the subject in a volume of nearly 400 pp. Seems to me that a traveller who was a musician might cultivate virgin soil in regard to the African music of the interior. All I can find relating to it seems to deal with the music of South Africa and the west and north coasts;—the interior is unknown musically. I expect to receive La Selve soon, however,—and if his announcement be truthful, we shall have something of interest therein regarding the cis-Atlantic Africa.
L. H.
I saw a notice in the Tribune regarding the negro Pan’s pipe described by Cable. I never saw it; but the fact is certainly very interesting. The cane is well adapted to inspire such manufacture.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1885.
Dear K.,—Just got a letter from you. Hope my reply to your delightful suggestion was received. I fear I write too often; but I can only write in snatches. Were I to wait for time to write a long letter, the result would be either 0 or something worse.
I have already in my mind a little plan. Let me suggest a long preface, and occasional picturesque notes to your learning and facts. For example, I would commence by treating the negro’s musical patriotism—the strange history of the Griots, who furnish so singular an example of musical prostitution, and who, although honoured and petted in one way, are otherwise despised by their own people and refused the rites of burial. Then I would relate something about the curious wanderings of these Griots through the yellow desert northward into the Moghreb country—often a solitary wandering; their performances at Arab camps on the long journey, when the black slaves come out to listen and weep;—then their hazardous voyaging to Constantinople, where they play old Congo airs for the great black population of Stamboul, whom no laws or force can keep within doors when the sound of Griot music is heard in the street. Then I would speak of how the blacks carry their music with them to Persia and even to mysterious Hadramaut, where their voices are held in high esteem by Arab masters. Then I would touch upon the transplantation of negro melody to the Antilles and the two Americas, where its strangest black flowers are gathered by the alchemists of musical science, and the perfume thereof extracted by magicians like Gottschalk. (How is that for a beginning?)
I would divide my work into brief sections of about 1½ pages each—every division separated by Roman numerals and containing one particular group of facts.
I would also try to show a relation between negro physiology and negro music. You know the blood of the African black has the highest human temperature known—equal to that of the swallow—although it loses that fire in America. I would like you to find out for me whether the negro’s vocal cords are not differently formed, and capable of longer vibration than ours. Some expert professor in physiology might tell you; but I regret to say the latest London works do not touch upon the negro vocal cords, although they do show other remarkable anatomical distinctions.
Here is the only Creole song I know of with an African refrain that is still sung:—don’t show it to C., it is one of our treasures.
(Pronounce “Wenday,” “makkiyah.”)
Ouendé, ouendé, macaya!
Ouendé, ouendé, macaya!
Mo bois bon divin, macaya!
Ouendé, ouendé, macaya!
Mo mangé bon poulet, macaya!
Ouendé, ouendé, macaya!
Mo pas barassé, macaya!
Ouendé, ouendé, macaya!—
Macaya!
I wrote from dictation of Louise Roche. She did not know the meaning of the refrain—her mother had taught her, and the mother had learned it from the grandmother. However, I found out the meaning, and asked her if she now remembered. She leaped in the air for joy—apparently. Ouendai or ouendé has a different meaning in the eastern Soudan; but in the Congo or Fiot dialect it means “to go”—“to continue to,” “to go on.” I found the word in Jeannest’s vocabulary. Then macaya I found in Turiault’s “Etude sur la Langage Créole de la Martinique:” ça veut dire "manger tout le temps”—“excessivement.” Therefore here is our translation:—
Go on! go on! eat enormously!
I ain’t one bit ashamed—eat outrageously!
Go on! go on! eat prodigiously!
I drink good wine,—eat ferociously!—
Go on! go on!—eat unceasingly!—
I eat good chicken—gorging myself!—
Go on! go on! etc.
How is this for a linguistic discovery? The music is almost precisely like the American river-music,—a chant, almost a recitative until the end of the line is reached; then for your mocking-music!
And by the way, in Guyana, there is a mockingbird more wonderful than ours—with a voice so sonorous and solemn and far-reaching that those Creole negroes who dwell in the great aisles of the forest call it zozo mon-pè (l’oiseau mon-père), the “My father-bird.” But the word father here signifieth a spiritual father—a ghostly father—the "Priest-bird"!
Now dream of the vast cathedral of the woods, whose sanctuary lights are the stars of heaven!
L. H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1885.
Dear Krehbiel,—You are a terribly neglectful correspondent: I have asked you nearly one hundred questions, not a single one of which you have ever deemed it worth while to answer. However, that makes no matter now,—as none of the questions were very important, certainly not in your estimation. I think you are right about the negro-American music, and that a Southern trip will be absolutely essential,—because I have never yet met a person here able to reproduce on paper those fractional tones we used to talk about, which lend such weirdness to those songs. The naked melody robbed of these has absolutely no national characteristic. The other day a couple of darkeys from the country passed my corner, singing—not a Creole song, but a plain negro ditty—with a recurrent burthen consisting of the cry:—
Oh! Jee-roo-sa-le-e-em!
I can’t describe to you the manner in which the syllable lem was broken up into four tiny notes, the utterance of which did not occupy one second,—all in a very low but very powerful key. The rest of the song was in a regular descending scale: the oh being very much prolonged and the other notes very quick and sudden. Wish I could write it; but I can’t. I think all the original negro-Creole songs were characterized by similar eccentricities. If you could visit a Creole plantation,—and I know Cable could arrange that for you,—you would be able to make some excellent studies.
Cable told me he wanted you to treat these things musically. I am sure, however, that his versions of them lack something—as regards rhythm (musical), time, and that shivering of notes into musical splinters which I can’t describe. I have never told him I thought so; but I suggest the matter to you for consideration. I think it would be a good idea to have a chat with him about a Southern trip in the interest of these Creole studies. I am also sure that one must study the original Creole-ditty among the full-blooded French-speaking blacks of the country,—not among the city singers, who are too much civilized to retain originality. When the bamboulas were danced there was some real “Congo” music; but the musicians are gone God knows where. The results of your Southern trip might be something very important. There is a rage in Europe for musical folk-lore. Considering what Gottschalk did with Creole musical themes, it is surprising more attention has not been paid to the ditties of the Antilles, etc. I am told there are stunning treasures of such curiosities in Cuba, Martinique,—all the Spanish and French possessions, but especially the former. The outlook is delightful; but I think with you that it were best to rely chiefly upon personal study. It strikes me the thing ought to be scientifically undertaken,—so as to leave as little as possible for others to improve upon or even to glean. If you care for names of French writers on African music, I can send.
Didst ever hear the music of the Zamacueca?
L. H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1886.
Dear Krehbiel,—Your very brief note was received almost simultaneously with my first perusal of your work in the Century. But the Cala-woman’s song is, I really think, imaginary. I have the real cry,—six notes and some fractions,—which I will send you when I get a man to write it down. The patate-cry is less African, but very pleasing. I have been somewhat surprised to discover that the word Voudoo is not African, but the corruption of a South-American mythological term with a singular history—too long to write now, but at your service whenever you may need it.
Plympton has been here on his way to the W. Indies via Florida—a white shadow, a ghost, a Voice,—utterly broken down. I fear his summers are numbered. He will return to his desk only to die, I fancy. A good, large-minded, frank, eccentric man—always a friend to me.
If you are interested in Provençal literature and song, and are not acquainted with Hueffer’s “Troubadours” (Chatto & Windus), let me recommend the volume as one of the most compact and scholarly I have yet seen. It is not exactly new, but new in its popularity on this side. His theories are original; his facts, of course, may be all old to you.
Houssaye is not a New Orleans favourite, like Albert Delpit, the Creole,—or Pierre Loti,—or Guy de Maupassant,—or the leaders of the later schools of erudite romance, such as Anatole France,—or the psychologists of naturalism. Finally, I am sorry to say, the same material saw light months ago in the Figaro, and is now quite ancient history to French-speaking New Orleans. However, I have to leave the matter entirely to Page, and the greatest obstacle will be price,—as we usually only pay $5 for foreign correspondence. Picayunish, I know; but Burke will pay $75 for a note from Loti, or a letter from Davitt, just for the name.
Try Roberts Bros, for Tunison. Chatto & Windus, of London, might also like the book;—the only trouble is that in England there is a lurking suspicion (not without foundation) of the untrustworthiness of American work of this kind,—so many things have been done hastily in this country, without that precision of scholarship and leisurely finish indispensable to solid endurance. If they can only be induced to read the MS., perhaps it would be all right. Rivington of London is another enterprising firm in the same line.
I expect to see you this summer—also to send you a volume of Chinese stories. Material is developing well. Won’t write again until I can tear and wrench and wring a big letter out of you
Affectionately,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1886.
My dear Musician,—Your letter delighted me. Strange as it may seem to you, the books and papers you sent me, I never received!
I feel a somewhat malicious joy in telling you that the translations you considered so abominable are printed without the least alteration, and also in assuring you that if you can spare time to read them you will like them. Still, I must say that the book is not free from errors, and that were I to do it all over again to-day, I should be able to improve upon it. It is my first effort, however, and I am therefore a little anxious; for to commence one’s literary career with a collapse would be very bad. I think I shall see you in New York this summer. I have a project on foot—to issue a series of translations of archaeological and artistic French romance—Flaubert’s “Tentation de Saint-Antoine;” De Nerval’s “Voyage en Orient;” Gautier’s “Avatar;” Loti’s most extraordinary African and Polynesian novels; and Baudelaire’s “Petits Poëmes en Prose.” If I can get any encouragement, it is not impossible that I might stay in New York awhile; but there is no knowing. I am working steadily toward the realization of one desire—to get rid of newspaper life.
No: I am not writing on music now—only book reviews, French and Spanish translations, and an occasional editorial. The musical reviews of the Times-Democrat are the work of Jean Augustin—one of the few talented Creoles here, who is the author of a volume of French poems, and is personally a fine fellow. We are now very busy writing up the Carnival. I have charge of the historical and mythological themes,—copies of which I will send you when the paper is printed. One of the themes will interest you as belonging to a novel and generally little known subject; but I have only been able to devote two days apiece to them (four in all), so you will make allowance for rough-and-ready work.
I am very happy to hear you are cozy, and nicely established, and the father of a little one, which I feel sure must inherit physical and mental comeliness of no common sort.
I cannot write as I wish to-day, as Carnival duties are pressing. So I will only thank you for your kindness, and conclude with a promise to do better next time
Your friend and admirer,
L. Hearn.
By the way, would you like a copy of De l’Isere’s work on diseases of the voice, and the rapports between sexual and vocal power? I have a copy for you, but you must excuse its badly battered condition. I have built up quite a nice library here; and the antiquarians bring me odd things when they get them. This is one, but it has been abused.
L. H.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, April, 1886.
My dear O’Connor,—Your dainty little gift was deeply appreciated. By this mail I send you a few papers containing an editorial on the subject—rather hastily written, I much regret to say, owing to pressure of other work,—but calculated, I trust, to excite interest in the nobly-written defence of Mrs. Pott’s marvellous commentary.
I have not written you because I felt unable to interest you in the condition I have been long in—struggling between the necessities of my trade and the aspirations of what I hope to prove my art. I have a little Chinese book on Ticknor & Co.’s stocks: if it appear you will receive it, and perhaps enjoy some pages. The volume is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph some day: poetical prose. I send also some cuttings,—leaves for a future volume to appear, God knows when, under the title “Notebook of an Impressionist.” Before completing it I expect to publish a novelette, which will be dedicated to you,—if I think it worthy of you. I will work at it all this summer.
I may also tell you that since I last wrote a very positive change has been effected in my opinions by the study of Herbert Spencer. He has completely converted me away from all ’isms, or sympathies with ’isms: at the same time he has filled me with the vague but omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt. I can no longer give adhesion to the belief in human automatism,—and that positive skepticism that imposes itself upon an undisciplined mind has been eternally dissipated in my case. I do not know if this philosophy interests you; but I am sure it would, if you are not already, as I suspect, an adept in it. I have only read, so far, the First Principles; but all the rest are corollaries only.
Now I have been selfish enough with my Ego;—let me trust you are well, not over-busy, and as happy as it is possible to be under ordinary conditions. I may run away to the sea for a while; I may run up North, and take the liberty of spending a few hours in Washington on my way back from New York. But whether I see you or not, believe always in my sincere affection
Your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, April, 1886.
Dear O’Connor,—I had not received your letter when I wrote mine. It pained me to hear of your having been ill, and especially ill in a way which I am peculiarly well qualified to understand—having been almost given up for dead some eight years ago. The same causes, the same symptoms—in every particular. Luckily for me I found a warmer climate, a city where literary competition was almost nothing, and men of influence who took an interest in my work, and let me have things my own way. Rest and cultivation of the animal part of me, and good care by a dear good woman, got me nearly well again. I am stronger than I ever was in some ways; but I have not the same recuperative vitality,—I cannot trust myself to any severe mental strain. “Sickness is health,” they say, for those who have received one of Nature’s severe corrections.
I mention my own case only to show that I understand yours, and to give you, if possible, the benefit of my experience. Long sleep is necessary, for two or three years. Do not be afraid to take ten, eleven, or twelve hours when you so feel inclined. I observe that the mind accomplishes more, and in a shorter time, after these protracted rests. Never work when you feel that little pain in the back of the head. Rare beefsteaks,—eggs just warmed,—and claret and water to stimulate appetite as often as possible, are important. Doctors can do little; you yourself can do a great deal. I think a few months, or even weeks, at the sea, would astonish you by the result. It did me. The abyss, out of which all mundane life is said to have been evolved,—the vast salt gulf of Creation,—seems still to retain its mysterious power: the Spirit still hovers over the Face of the Deep,—and the very breath of the ocean gives new soul to the blood.
You will already know what I think of your beautiful book, with all of which I heartily concur. But do not attempt to overwork any more. You ought not to trust yourself to do more than three or four hours’ work a day,—and even this application ought to be interrupted at intervals. I take a smoke every hour or so. The main thing—please do not doubt it—is plenty of nourishment, cultivation of appetite, and much sleep. Then Nature will right herself—slowly, though surely.
Do not write to me if it tires you. I know just how it is; I know also that you feel well toward me even if you have to keep silence. I will write whenever I think I can interest you,—and never fail to drop me a line if I can do anything to please you—just a line. I would not have been silent so long, had I even suspected you were ill. My own illness of eight years back was caused by years of night-work—16 hours a day. Several of my old comrades died at it. I quit—took courage to attempt a different class of work, and, as the French say, I have been able to re-make my constitution. I trust it won’t bore you, my writing all this: I understand so exactly how you have been that I am anxious to give all the suggestions I can.
I remain, dear O’Connor,
Very affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, May, 1886.
Dear Krehbiel,—I think I shall soon be able to send you a Hindoo. Yes, a Hindoo,—with Orientally white teeth, the result of vegetal diet and Brahmanic abstemiousness—rather prognathous, I am sorry to say, and not therefore of purest Aryan breed. He may be a Thug, a Sepoy deserter, a Sikh drummed out of the army, a Brahmin who has lost caste, a Pariah thief, a member of the Left-hand or of the Right-hand caste (or other sections too horrible to name), a Jain, a half-breed Mongol Islamite from Delhi, a Ghoorkha, a professional fraud, a Jesuitic convert on trial ... I know not;—I send him to you with my best regard. You are large and strong; you can take care of yourself! I send him to the Tribune,—fearing the awful results of his visit to 305 West Fifty-fifth Street.
How did I find him? Well, he came one day to our office to protest about some of my editorials on Indian questions. I found he talked English well, wrote with sufficient accuracy to contribute to the T.-D., and had been in the Indian civil service. I questioned him on Hindoo literature: found him somewhat familiar with the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Vedantas,—heard him reiterate the names of the great Sanscrit poets and playwrights—Kalidasa, Vyasa, Jayadeva, Bhartrihari. He first taught me accurately to pronounce the awful title Mricchakatikâ, which means “The Chariot of Baked Clay;” and he translated for me, although with great effort and very badly, one of the delicious love-lyrics of the divine Amaron. Therefore I perceived that he knew something vaguely about the vast Mother of Languages.
And he sang for me the chants of the temples, in a shrill Indian tenor, with marvellously fine splintering of notes—melancholy, dreamy, drowsy, like the effect of monotonous echoes in a day of intense heat and atmospheric oppression.
Why, then, did not my heart warm toward him? Was it because, in the columns of the Times-Democrat, he had boldly advocated the burning of widows and abused the Government of which I remain a loving subject? Was it because he made his appearance simultaneously with that of that colossal fraud, the “North, South and Central American Exposition”? Nay: it was because of his prognathism, his exceedingly sinister eye, like the eye of a creature of prey; his shaky suppleness of movement; and his mysterious past. How might I trust myself alone with a man who looked like one of the characters of the “Moonstone”? And yet I regret ... what a ridiculous romance I might have made!
Never mind, I send him to you! He says he is a Brahman. He says he can sing you the chants and dirges of his sun-devoured land. Let him sing!—let him chant! If he merit interest in the shape of fifty cents, give it to him, and watch him slip it into his swarthy bosom with the stealthy gesture of one about to pull forth a moon-shaped knife. Or tell him where to get, or to look for work. He worked here in a moss-factory and in a sash-factory and other factories; living upon rice and beans more cheaply than a Chinaman. Yet beware you do not smite him on the nostrils without large and solid reason. I give him a letter to you. Amen! (P.S. His alleged name is Sattee or Suttee—perhaps most probably the latter, as he advocates it.)
I received your book—a charming volume in all that makes a volume charming: including clear tinted paper, not too glossy; fascinating type; broad margins; tasteful binding. Thanks for dear little phrase written in it. I will send first criticism of contents in shape of a review. Have something else to talk of later.
I hope you received photograph sent by Baker through me,—and paper. The translation does not convey original force of style; but it may serve to reveal something of the author’s intensity. His power of impressing and communicating queer sensations makes him remarkable
Affectionately,
L. Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1886.
Dear Krehbiel,—I was waiting to write you in the hope of being able to send you some literary news. I have my little Chinese book in Ticknor’s hands; but the long silence is still unbroken. The omen is not a bad one, yet I am disappointed in not being able now, when replying to your delightful letter, to tell you everything is O. K.,—because the book is dedicated to you. There are only six little stories; but each of them cost months of hard work and study, and represent a much higher attempt than anything in the “Stray Leaves.” The dedication will, I think, amuse you if the book appears,—and will be more or less mysterious to the rest of the world. I fear now it cannot be published in time to reach you before you leave for Europe.
Well, dear old fellow, I think I must try to see you at New York anyhow. At all events I must have a change. The prolonged humidity and chilliness of our winter is telling on me; I have been considerably pulled down in spite of an easy life, and must try the sea somewhere. I fear the Eastern beaches are too expensive; but I could run North, and spend the rest of the time allowed me after my visit at some obscure fishing village. Europe, I fear, must be given up this summer. I could visit Spain in company with a dear friend, Dr. Matas; but I feel it a duty to myself to stick at literary work this summer in order to effect a new departure.
Now, I must tell you about it. I am writing a novelette. It will require at least twelve months to finish—though it will be a tiny book. It will be all divided into microscopic chapters of a page or half-a-page each. Every one of these is to be a little picture, with some novel features. Some touches of evolutionary philosophy. I want to make something altogether odd, novel, ideal in the best sense. The theme, I fear, you will not like. The story of a somewhat improper love—a fascination developed into a sincere but vain affection—an effort to re-create what has been hopelessly lost,—a seeking after the impossible. I am not quite sure yet how I shall arrange the main part;—there will be much more of suggestion than of real plot.... I do, indeed, remember your advice; but I am not sorry not to have followed it before. My style was not formed; I did not really know how to work; I am only now beginning to learn. Ticknor writes that if I should undertake a novelette, he is certain it would succeed. So I shall try. In trying I must study from real material; I must take models where I can find them. Still the work will be ideal to the verge of fantasy.
So much for that. If I have been selfish enough to talk first about myself, it is partly because I cannot answer your question without giving some of my own experience. You ask about style; you deem yours unsatisfactory, and say that I overestimated it. Perhaps I may have overestimated particular things that with a somewhat riper judgement I would consider less enthusiastically. But I always perceived an uncommon excellence in the tendency of your style—a purity and strength that is uncommon and which I could never successfully imitate. A man’s style, when fully developed, is part of his personality. Mine is being shaped for a particular end; yours, I think, is better adapted to an ultimately higher purpose. The fact that you deem it unsatisfactory shows, I fancy, that you are in a way to develop it still further. I have only observed this, that it is capable of much more polish than you have cared to bestow upon it. Mind! I do not mean ornament;—I do not think you should attempt ornament, but rather force and sonority. Your tendency, I think, is naturally toward classical purity and correctness—almost severity. With great strength,—ornament becomes unnecessary; and the general cultivation of strength involves the cultivation of grace. I still consider yours a higher style than mine, but I do not think you have cultivated it to one fourth of what it is capable. Now, let me say why.
Chiefly, I fancy, for want of time. If you do not know it already, let me dwell upon an art principle. Both you and I have a trade: journalism. We have also an art: authorship. The same system of labour cannot be applied to the one as to the other without unfortunate results. Let the trade be performed as mechanically as is consistent with preservation of one’s reputation as a good workman: any more labour devoted to it is an unpaid waste of time. But when it comes to writing a durable thing,—a book or a brochure,—every line ought to be written at least twice, if possible three times. Three times, at all events, to commence with. First—roughly, in pencil: after which correct and reshape as much as you deem necessary. Then rewrite clean in pencil. Read again; and you will be surprised to find how much improvement is possible. Then copy in ink, and in the very act of copying, new ideas of grace, force, and harmony will make themselves manifest. Without this, I will venture to say, fine literary execution is impossible. Some writers need the discipline less than others. You, for example, less than I. My imagination and enthusiasm have to be kept in control; my judgements to be reversed or amended; my adjectives perpetually sifted and pruned. But my work is ornamental—my dream is poetical prose: a style unsuited to literature of the solid and instructive kind. Have you ever worked much with Roget’s "Thesaurus"?—it is invaluable. Still more valuable are etymological dictionaries like those of Skeat (best in the world), of Brachet (French), of Dozy and Engelmann (Spanish-Arabic). Such books give one that subtle sense of words to which much that startles in poetry and prose is due. Time develops the secret merit of work thus done.... These, dear K., are simply my own experiences, ideas, and impressions. I now think they are correct. In a few years I might modify them. They may contain useful suggestions. Our humblest friends may suggest valuable things sometimes.
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 learned what an absurd thing positive skepticism is. 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 two years to devour the rest of this oceanic philosophy. But this is boring you too much for the nonce.
Believe me, dear friend, affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1886.
Dear Krehbiel,—I must drop you another line or two; for you must let me hear from you again before you go to Europe.
I have completely recovered from the nervous shock which the sudden return of my tiny volume produced in spite of myself; and all my scattered plans are being re-crystallized. I know my work is good in some respects; and if it bears reading over well, next winter I may take a notion to publish a small edition at my own expense. In fact, I believe I will have to publish several things at my own expense. Even if my art-ideas are correct (and I sincerely believe they are)—in their most mature form they would represent a heterodox novelty in American style, and literary heterodoxies no publisher will touch. I am going to give up the novelette idea,—it is too large an undertaking at present,—and will try short stories. My notebooks will always be useful. Whenever I receive a new and strong impression, even in a dream, I write it down, and afterwards develop it at leisure. These efforts repay me well in the end.
There are impressions of blue light and gold and green, correlated to old Spanish legend, which can be found only south of this line. I obtained a few in Florida;—I must complete the effect by future visits: therefore I shall go to the most vast and luminous of all ports known to the seamen of the South—the Bay of the Holy Ghost (Espiritu Santo),—in plainer language, Tampa. So I shall vegetate a while longer in the South. I have some $600 saved up; but, I fear, under present circumstances, that I would be imprudent to expend it all in a foreign trip, and will wait until I can make some sort of impression with some new sort of work. The T.-D. will save expenses for me on Florida trip, and instead of roar and rumble of traffic and shrieking of steam and dust of microbes, I shall dream by the shores of phosphorescent seas, and inhale the Spirit that moveth over the face of the Deep.
I forgot in my last to thank you for little notice in the playbill of my Gautier stories; but you were mistaken as to their being paraphrases. They were literal translations, so far as I was able to make them at the time. I am sorry that they now appear full of faults: especially as I cannot get any publisher to take them away from Worthington. If I succeed some day, I may be able to get out a more perfect edition in small neat shape. “Stray Leaves” also has several hideous errors in it. I never dare now to look at them for fear of finding something else worse than before.
By the way, last year I had to muster up courage to condemn a lot of phantasmagoria to the flames
Very affectionately,
Lafcadio.
Dear K.,—Like a woman I must always add a P.S.
Something that has been worrying me demands utterance. A Paris correspondent of the Tribune, grossly misinformed, has written an error to that paper on “Lakme.” “Lakme” may have been drawn from “Le Mariage de Loti,”—the weirdest and loveliest romance, to my notion, ever written;—but that novel has nothing to do with India or English officers. It is a novel of Polynesian life in Tahiti. It is unspeakably beautiful and unspeakably odd. I translated its finest passages in a so-and-so way when it first came out, and won the good will of its clever author, Julien Viaud, who sent me his portrait and a very pretty letter. I have collected every scrap “Loti” wrote, and translated many things: will send you a rough-and-ready translation from his new novel on Sunday. No writer ever had such an effect upon me; and time strengthens my admiration. I hold him the greatest of living writers of the Impressionist School; and still he is something more—he has a spirituality peculiarly his own, that reminds you a little of Coleridge. I cannot even think of him without enthusiasm. Therefore I feel sorry to hear of him being misrepresented. He is a great musician in the folk-lore way, too; and in one of my letters to him I mentioned your name. Some day you might come together; and he could sing you all the Polynesian and African songs you want. He has lived in the Soudan. I sent you once a fragment by him upon those African improvisors, called Griots. If the Tribune ever wants anything written about Loti, see if you can’t persuade them to apply to me. I know all about his life and manners, and I would not ask any remuneration for so delightful a privilege as that of being able to do him justice in a great paper. His address is 141 Rue St. Pierre, Rochefort-sur-Mer. You might see him in Europe, perhaps.
Lafcadio H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, October, 1886.
Dear Krehbiel,—While in hideous anxiety I await the decision of my future by various damnably independent censors, I must seize the moment of leisure—the first calm after a prolonged storm of work—to chat with you awhile, and to thank you for your musical aid. Alden is, of course, deliberating over the “Legend of l’Ile Dernière;” Roberts Bros. are deliberating over “Chinese Ghosts;” I am also deliberating about a voyage to Havana, the Mystical Rose of a West Indian dawn—with palms shaking their plumes against the crimsoning. What are you deliberating about? Something that I shall be crazy to read, no doubt, and will have the delight of celebrating the appearance of in the editorial columns of the provincial T.-D.! O that I were the directing spirit of some new periodical—backed by twenty million dollar publishing interests,—and devoted especially to the literary progression of the future,—the realization of a dream of poetical prose,—the evolution of the Gnosticism of the New Art! Then, wouldn’t I have lots to say about The Musician,—my musician,—and the Song of Songs that is to be!
For my own purpose now lieth naked before me, without shame. I suppose we all have a purpose, an involuntary goal, to which the Supreme Ghost, unknowingly to us, directs our way; and when we find we have accomplished what we wished for, we also invariably find that we have travelled thither by a route very different from that which we laid out for ourselves, and toward a consummation not precisely that which we anticipated—although pleasing enough. Well, you remember my ancient dream of a poetical prose,—compositions to satisfy an old Greek ear,—like chants wrought in a huge measure, wider than the widest line of a Sanscrit composition, and just a little irregular, like Ocean-rhythm. I really think I will be able to realize it at last. And then, what? I really don’t know. I fancy that I shall have produced a pleasant effect on the reader’s mind, simply with pictures; and that the secret work, the word-work, will not be noticed for its own sake. It will be simply an eccentricity for critics; an originality for those pleased by it—but I’m sure it will be grateful unto the musical ear of H. E. K.!
Now I remember promising to write about going to New York.
Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!
’Tis winter. My lizard blood freezes at the thought. In my room it is 71°: that is cold for us. New York in winter signifieth for such as me—Dissolution,—eternal darkness and worms. Transformation of physical and vital forces of L. H. into the forces of innumerable myriads of worms! “And though a man live many years, and rejoice in them all—yet let him remember the Days of Darkness,—for they shall be many!” No: March, April, or May! But you say,—“Then it will be the same old story, and seasons will cycle, and generations pass away, and yet he will not come.” Yet there are symptoms of my coming: little spider-threads of literary weaving with New York are thickening. When the rope is strong, I can make my bridge.—Think of the trouble I would have with my $1800 of books, and all my other truck. Alas! I have an anchor!
My friend Matas has returned. He tells me delightful things about Spanish music, and plays for me. He also tells me much concerning Cuban and Mexican music. He says these have been very strongly affected by African influence—full of contretemps. He tried to explain about the accompaniments of Havanen and Mexican airs having peculiar interresemblances of a seemingly dark origin—the bass goes all the time something like Si, Mi, Si,—si, mi, si. “See me?—see?” that’s how I remembered it. But he has given me addresses, and I will be able to procure specimens
Affectionately,
Lafcadio.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, February, 1887.
Dear O’Connor,—Please, if feeling free enough from other and more important labours, write to me, let me have a few lines from you—telling me how you are, and how the years pass.
With me they have been somewhat uneventful—except, indeed, that your wish to see me succeed with the Harpers has been realized: I have become a contributor to the Magazine, and am going to have the honour of a short sketch of myself in it,—of course, in connection with the New Southern Literary Movement. And I will also soon have the pleasure of sending you a new production, just got, or getting out by a Boston house,—my “Chinese Ghosts;” brief studies in poetical prose, if you like. They may amuse you in a leisure moment.
I am soon going to run away to Florida, and perhaps the West Indies, for a romantic trip—a small literary bee in search of inspiring honey. There is a good market for books on Florida; and I may be able to get one out this next winter. You will like my sketch in Harper’s when it appears, as it deals with topics in which you are directly interested professionally,—Gulf-coasts and shifting dunes, sands, winds and tides, storms, and valiant saving of life. I think I am beginning to learn how to do good work.
I trust you are feeling strong and hearty. Last time you wrote me you were quite ill.
How delightful it would be if you could take a trip with me in March, to the Floridian springs, to windy Key West, or to the palmier Antilles, where we might watch together the rose-blossoming of extraordinary sunrises, the conflagration of apocalyptic sunsets. Is it impossible? My dreams now are full of fantastic light—a Biblical light: and the World-Ghost, all blue, promises inspiration. Could we not celebrate the Blue Ghost’s pentecost together?
Affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO W. D. O’CONNOR
New Orleans, March, 1887.
Dear O’Connor,—I was sincerely pained to hear of your illness; and reading your long, kind, affectionate letter, felt that I had, without intending it, strained your generosity by causing you to write so much while ill. Not that your letter was wanting in any of those splendid and unique qualities which, I think, make you unrivalled as a letter-writer; but that, having been once severely shocked by overwork myself, I am fully aware how much it costs to write a long letter when the nervous system flags. In sending you this tiny book, I only desire to amuse you in leisure moments when you might feel inclined to read it;—don’t think I want you to write me about it; for if you were to write again before you get quite strong you would pain me....
I find I will have to go to the West Indies by way of New York;—at first I intended to go through lower Florida, and take a steamer at Key West for Havana. But I would have to change vessels so many times, I thought it best to get a New York steamer for Trinidad. In Trinidad I can see South American flora in all their splendour; in Jamaica and, especially, Martinique, I can get good chances to study those Creole types which are so closely allied to our own. I want to finish a tiny volume of notes of travel—Impressionist-work,—always keeping to my dream of a poetical prose.
But I feel you will have to make some new departure in your own work at Washington: so terrible a mill as they have there for grinding minds, frightens me! I used to think Government positions were facile to fill, and exacted less than ordinary professions in private life. I see such is not the case; and I hope you will be prudent, and not return to the same exacting duties again—enemigo reconciliado, enemigo doblado. My own sad experience at journalistic work, which broke me down, did me great good: it rendered it out of the question ever to put myself in a similar situation, and instead of the old loss of liberty I found leisure to study, to dream a little, to conceive an ambition which I now hope to fulfil in the course of a few years, if I live. Out of the misfortune, good came to me; and I notice that Nature is really very kind when we obey her;—she gives back more than she takes away, she lessens energies to increase mental powers of assimilation; she compels recognition, like the God of Job “who maketh silence in the high places,” and after having taught us what we cannot do, then returns to us a hundredfold that which she first took away. This is just what she will do for you; and I even hope the day will come when you will feel quite glad that you did overwork yourself a little, because the result turned the splendid stream of your mind into a broader channel of daily action, not confined within boundaries of hewn stone, but shadowed by odorous woods, and swept by free winds, and changing under the pressure of the will-current.
I want you to feel full of cheer and faith in this dear Nature of ours, who is certain to make you strong and lucky,—if you don’t go back to that horrid brain-mill in the Capital.
I will write you a little while I am gone,—if I can find a little strange bit of tropical colour to spread on the paper,—like the fine jewel-dust of scintillant moth-wings.
Believe me, with sincerest wishes and regards,
Affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Krehbiel,—Your letter contained a cutting truth,—“This is not a country to dream in; but to get rich or go to the poorhouse.” Still, O golden-haired musician, is it not a crime to stifle the aspirations toward the beautiful which strive to burn upon the altar of every generous heart? Why not aim to kindle the holy fire, in spite of harsh realities and rains of Disappointment?
If you have written any pretty things recently let me see a copy soon as possible.
Don’t forget me altogether. It will be best to address me at post-office.
A gentleman lent me a bundle of Creole music yesterday. I could not copy it; the writing was too funny; but he is going to have it copied in order to send it to you
Very truly yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Afterthought!—It has just occurred to me to ask if you are familiar with Lissajous’ experiments. I know nothing about them except what I found in Flammarion’s great “Astronomie Populaire.” One extraordinary chapter on numbers gives diagrams of the vibrations of harmonics—showing their singular relation to the geometrical designs of crystal-formation;—and the chapter is aptly closed by the Pythagorean quotation: Ἀεὶ ὁ Θεὸς γεωμετρεί.—“God geometrizes everywhere."... I should imagine that the geometry of a fine opera would—were the vibrations outlined in similar fashion—offer a network of designs which for intricate beauty would double discount the arabesque of the Alhambra. I was reading in an article on Bizet not long ago that music has ceased to be an art and has become a science—in which event it must have a mathematical future!... Probably all this is old to you; but it produced such an impression upon me when I first saw it, that I believe its mention won’t tire you anyhow. And then, between friends, it is a pleasure to exchange thoughts even of the most hyperbolical, and, perhaps, useless description.
L. H.
I send specimen music choral dance of Greek women in Megara. It is called La Trata, and was first published in Bourgault-Ducoudray’s "Souvenirs d’une mission musicale en Grèce;”—I took mine from Mélusine. The dance is very peculiar, and is supposed to have been danced in antique times at the festival of Neptune or Poseidon. The women form a chain, by so interlacing their hands that across each woman’s breast the hands of those on either side of her are clasped. The dancers move forward and retreat in file,—as if pulling nets. Ancient tomb-paintings show it was known in early Roman times also;—might not the music be as old as the dance,—as old as Phidias anyhow?... I suppose this is absurd, but wish it wasn’t.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Krehbiel,—Excuses for silence between us are, I fancy, recognized as unnecessary, since they always have a good cause. I read with admiration and pleasure the fine critiques you were kind enough to send me; and I verily believe that you will be recognized sooner or later, if you are not already, as the best musical critic in the United States. Of course, I’m talking now on a subject I know little about; yet, if there be any superior to you, I am sure it is only that, being much older than you, they may have had a generation longer of opportunities for study.
My little book is advancing; and I am now face to face with what I recognize as one of the most awful situations in life, the criticism of the proofreader. I don’t mean the commonplace proof-reader, who is a mere printer; but the terrible scholar who supervises proofs for a leading class of publishers, such as the man of the University or Riverside Press, who knows all rules of grammar, all laws of form, all the weaknesses of writers,—and whose frightful suggestions are often simply crushing! What you have spent a month in making a beauty-blossom of style, may suddenly fade into worthless dust at one touch of his terrific pencil, making the simple hook-mark “?”. I can imagine I hear a voice asking: “Do you desire to make a fool of yourself by having this line in print?” And then the after-thoughts, the premature hurrying away of proofs, the frantic rush to the telegraph-office to have them returned or corrected, the humble letters of apology for trouble given, the yells of anguish in bed at night when I think to myself, “Oh! what a d—d ass I have been!” I have been now three times in front of this awful man, and like the angels he is without wrath and wholly without pity.
Your query about an opera-subject which suggested my lines about Rabyah, also inspired me to make the story a poetical sketch in my best style, which I sent to Harper’s Bazar; and perhaps, when you read it, you will think again more favourably about the theme. I am going one of these days to make a study on the romance of Rabyah’s courtship and marriage, which is very pretty in the rendering of the old Arabian chronicles. I understand exactly what you want; but not having any accurate idea of stage-necessities and theatrical exigencies, I fear you must always remain the one to determine the worth of any operatic suggestion possible to make. Now, for example, I can’t understand why Rabyah’s death could not be mounted, etc. You will like the colour of my sketch for the Bazar, to which I gave the title of “Rabyah’s Last Ride.” I have adopted the Arabic names, in preference to Lyall’s or Muir’s, unpronounceable at sight.—It seems to me that you can devise a splendid piece of gloomy beauty from the “Kalewala.”
I am going to the West Indies as soon as my book is out. It will be a tiny 16mo, with Chinese figures.
Believe me always your warmest friend,
Lafcadio.
I made a mistake in writing you about Hindola and Kabit; they represent poetical measures, or styles of chant, not instruments. See how my memory failed me.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—More than two weeks before receiving your most welcome letter, I wrote to Messrs. Roberts Bros. of Boston to send you, as soon as published, a copy of “Chinese Ghosts,” which will appear in a few weeks. It opens with the story of the Bell—the legend of the Great Bell of Pekin, or Pe-King;—and you will also find in it the “Legend of the Tea-Plant:” both in better form than that which you first saw.... If you watch the Harper’s Bazar, you will find in it a little pre-Islamic story—“Rabyah’s Last Ride,”—which I expect will please you.
I am under so many obligations to you that I can’t attempt to thank you seriatim; but I am especially grateful to you for the pleasure of knowing something of Mrs. Alice W. Rollins. All the nice little things you have written about me and said about me, I can only hope to thank you for as I should like, when I am better able to prove what I feel.
As for your criticism of my queer ways, I can only say in explanation that I suspected a slightly sarcastic tendency where I was no doubt mistaken, and simply beat retreat from an imaginary fire.
Anyhow, let me assure you no one has ever had a sincerer belief in, or a higher opinion of your abilities, or a profounder recognition of many uncommon qualities discerned in you,—than myself. I trust you will soon receive the visit of the Ghosts: there are only six of them
Very truly and gratefully,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
New Orleans, April 7 and 14, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—Your delightful letter ought, I imagine, to have been answered before; but among literary brothers and sisters a little delay can always be comprehended and forgiven, even without explanation. The explanation, however, might be interesting to one who feels so generous a sympathy with my work. I am trying to find the Orient at home,—to apply the same methods of poetical-prose treatment to modern local and living themes. The second attempt, in form of a novelette, is nearly ready. The subject of the whole is one which you love as much as I,—Louisiana Gulf-life.
Yes, indeed, I remember the Baboo!—with his prognathic profile, and his Yakshasa smile. I remember him especially, perhaps, because I first learned in his presence that your eyes were grey, instead of black.... I sent the Baboo to Krehbiel with a letter last summer;—taking care, however, to warn my friend against the ways of the Phansigars. Really the Baboo was an uncanny fellow; and the mysterious fact of his discharge from the British Civil Service impressed me as suspicious.
I think you are really lucky to be able to see and hear a Brahmin, and to find the East at your right hand. Atmans and mantras, and the skandhas, and the Days and Nights of Him with the unutterable name, and the mystic syllable Aum! Enough to suggest all the rest,—light, warmth, sounds, and the splendour of nights in which fountain-jets of song do bubble up from the rich flood of flower-odours.... Perhaps I shall be able to see the Brahmin;—I hope to be in New York early in May. I do not know whether I shall behold you;—you will be there, as here, a blossom dangerous to approach by reason of the unspeakable multitude of bees!
I have always wondered at your pluck in going boldly into the mouth of that most merciless of all monsters—a Metropolis of the first dimension,—and at your success in the face of very serious difficulties of the competitive sort. Let me hope you will feel always confident, as I do, that you are going to do more. You have one very remarkable and powerful faculty,—that of creating an impression, that remains, with a very few words. It shows itself in little things—for example, your few lines about the composite photos. Do you still write verse? A little volume of poetry by you is something I hope to see one of these days. The only thing I used to be afraid of regarding you was that you might lack the rare yet terribly necessary gift of waiting. And yet, there is something very unique in your literary temperament;—you are able to reach an effect at once and directly which others would obtain only by long effort. If you like anything I have done, it is because I have taken horrible pains with it. Eight months’ work on one sketch;—then eight months on another—not yet finished; but happily 120 pages are done; and the first was only 75. The attempt at romantic work on modern themes taught me lots of things. One is, that the purpose, as well as the thought, must evolve itself, but the thought must come first;—then the thing begins to develop—and always in a different way from that at first intended. Also I found that the importance of noting down impressions, introspective or otherwise,—and expanding them at leisure, is simply enormous. Perhaps you know all this already;—if not, try it and get a pretty surprise.
I have one thing more to chat about;—I am trying to get all my friends to read Herbert Spencer—beginning with “First Principles.” Slow reading, but invaluable; systematizes all one’s knowledge and plans and ideas. I’ve made three converts. The only way to read him is by paragraphs—all of which are numbered. I am now wrestling with the two big volumes of “Biology,” and have digested one of the “Sociology.” The “Psychology” I will touch last, though it is his mightiest work. Four years’ study, at least, for me to complete the reading. But “First Principles” contain the digest of all;—the other volumes are merely corollaries. When one has read Spencer, one has digested the most nutritious portion of all human knowledge. Also the style is worth the labour,—puissant, compact, and melodious.
Believe me always with many thanks for kind letter,
Your friend and literary brother,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Twice commenced, it is time this rambling document should finish. But I forgot to tell you C. D. Warner is here—stops at No. 13 Rampart. He called once at my rooms, seated himself among the papers, dust, bad pictures, and general desolation; and went away, leaving his card upon the valise (long-extemporized into a desk). I did not see him! He never called again.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
New Orleans, April, 1887.
Dear Sir,—However pleasant may have been the impulse prompting your generous letter, I doubt whether you could fully comprehend the value of it to myself,—the value of literary encouragement from an evidently strong source. There is nothing an author or an artist needs so much,—nothing that is more difficult to obtain.
After all, the reward for him who strives to express beauty or truth, for its own sake, is just such a letter as yours; for his aim is only to reach and touch that kindred something in another which the Christian calls Soul,—the Pantheist, God,—the philosopher, the Unknowable.
Your wish as to the application to modern themes of the same literary methods is about to be accomplished. I do not know how the work will be received by the public, nor can I tell just when it will appear; but I think soon, and in Harper’s Magazine (entre nous!). If it appears subsequently (or immediately) in more enduring form, I shall show my gratefulness by sending you a copy
Believe me, very sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
New Orleans, April, 1887.
Dear Mr. Gould,—You could not have done me more pleasure than by sending me your pamphlet on the “Colour-Sense.” I am an Evolutionist, and as thorough a disciple of Spencer as it is possible for one not a practical scientist to be; and such studies, combined with art and poetry, with which they serve in my case to stimulate and illustrate and expand, are my delight. I like your criticism on Grant Allen, too. In his “Physiological Æsthetics,” as well as in “Common-Sense in Science” and various other volumes, he has occasionally made singularly wild divergences from the perfectly smooth path he professes to travel—tumbled into imaginative thickets, lost himself in romantic groves. Still he is, as you observe, more than interesting sometimes; delightful, suggestive, skilled in giving a charming homeliness and familiarity to new truths vast as the sky.
The pamphlet on retinal insensibility I have not yet read through; and I fear some parts of it will prove too technical for me. But its larger conclusions and elucidations impress me already sufficiently to tell me that a more complete grasp of it will more than please and surprise.
My novelette is complete and in a publisher’s hands. When you read the first part, whether in the Magazine or in book form,—I think you will find much of what you have said regarding the Æsthetic Symbolism of Colour therein expressed, intuitively,—especially regarding the holiness of the sky-colour,—the divinity of Blue. Blue is the World-Soul
With grateful regards,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Mr. Gould,—Reading your letter, I was strongly impressed by the similarity in thought, inspiration, range, even chirography, with the letters of a very dear friend, almost a brother, and also a physician,—though probably less mature than you in many ways. A greater psychological resemblance I have never observed. My friend is very young, but already somewhat eminent here;—he has been demonstrator of anatomy for some years at our University, and will ultimately, I am sure, turn out a great name in American medicine. But he is a Spaniard,—Rodolfo Matas. I first felt really curious about him after having visited him to obtain some material for a fantastic anatomical dream-sketch, and asked where I could find good information regarding the lives and legends of the great Arabian physicians. When he ran off a long string of names, giving the specialties of each man, and criticizing his work, I was considerably surprised; and even felt a little skeptical until I got hold of Leclerc and Sprengel and found the facts there as given to me by word of mouth. I trust you will meet him some day, and find in him an ideal confrère, which I am sure he would find in you. It is a singular fact that most of my tried friends have been physicians.
You asked me about Gautier. I have read and possess nearly all his works; and before I was really mature enough for such an undertaking I translated his six most remarkable short stories: (“Une Nuit de Cléopâtre;” “La Morte Amoureuse;” “Arria Marcella;” “Le Pied de Momie;” “Le Roi Candaule;” and “Omphale”), which were published by R. Worthington under the title of the opening story,—“One of Cleopatra’s Nights.” The work contains, I regret to say, several shocking errors; and the publisher refused me the right to correct the plates. The book remains one of the sins of my literary youth; but I am sure my judgement of the value of the stories was correct, and if ever able I shall try to get out a new and correct edition. Of Sainte-Beuve I have read very little—found him silver-grey. Most of the Romantic school I have. If you like Gautier, how much more would you like the work of Julien Viaud (Pierre Loti). We know each other by letter. Read “Le Roman d’un Spahi” first; I think it will astonish you. Then “Le Mariage de Loti;” then "Fleurs d’Ennui.” All his work, which has already won, even for so young a man, the highest encomium of the Academy, and the Vitel prize, is extraordinary; but my dislike of grey skies, fogs and ice, causes me to find less pleasure in “Mon Frère Yves,” and “Pêcheur d’Islande,” though there are superb tropical pages scattered through the latter.
I send you a little Arabian story, which I wrote for Harper’s Bazar last winter, and which I will reproduce some day in another shape, if I live to complete my Arabian plan. Perhaps you are familiar with the legend.
You will be glad to hear my novelette has been purchased by the Magazine. So that I may ultimately hope to be able to leave journalism alone. It is not arduous work for me; but I am a thorough demophobe, and it compels me to meet many disagreeable experiences,—experiences which often result in absolute nervous prostration caused wholly by annoyance. You can imagine the difficulties of creating artistic things only in the intervals of a long succession of petty troubles. Such troubles would be absurd to most minds, but to me they are horribly serious: I have a badly-balanced nervous make-up.
Next week I go away to hunt up some tropical or semi-tropical impressions. The Atlantic has given me some attention, and I am going to try to make a sketch for them.
Yours must be a very remarkable mind: I was greatly impressed by the plan and purpose and admirable instructive excellence of that optic model you sent me the circular of. In fact, I feel very small when I compare the work of my fancy with the work of such knowledge as yours. Still I have the power to give you pleasure, which is quite a consolation.
Believe me very truly, your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P.S. Are you inclined to believe in a further evolution of the colour-sense? Spencer, in vol. II “Biology,” is rather conservative as to the further prospects of physical evolution, although I suppose further moral evolution must necessitate a further progress in the nervous system.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
New Orleans, 1887.
In reply to nearly all the questions about my near-sightedness, I might answer, “Yes.” Had the best advice in London. Observe all the rules you suggest. Glasses strain the eye too much—part of retina is gone. Other eye destroyed by a blow at college; or rather by inflammation consequent upon blow. Can tell you more about myself when I see you, but the result will be more curious than pleasing. Myopia is not aggravating.
I knew you were going to have thorough success;—you will do far better than you think. Wish I had the opportunity to study medicine, or rather, the ability to be a good physician. 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 will, 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. To be a physician, an architect, an engineer,—anything that makes one capable of supplying to a universal or cosmopolitan want, is a great capital. Next to this, a good tradesman is worthy of envy: he may feel as much at home in Valparaiso as in New York; in Bangkok as in Paris.
Apropos of a medical novel, again,—have you had occasion to remark the fact that among the French, every startling discovery in medicine or those sciences akin to medicine, is almost immediately popularized by a capital story? The best of those I have seen appeared in the Revue Politique et Littéraire and in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The evolution of electricity by the human body suggested a powerful but very Frenchy sketch in the former some years ago, which appeared concomitantly with those theatrical exhibitions of a famous “electrical woman.” Then there was one dealing with the super-refinement of the five senses, particularly vision and smell,—entitled “Un Fou.” The researches of Charcot and others into hypnotism and its phenomena, doubtless suggested “Une Tresse Blonde” in the Revue des Deux Mondes.
It is always a safe and encouraging thing to trace one’s ancestral history, supposing one be very philosophical. In your case it is. A fine physical and mental man can feel sure from the mere fact of his comparative superiority that he has something to thank his ancestors for. But suppose the man be small, puny, sickly, scrofulous,—the question of ancestry becomes unpleasant. We are far ahead of Tristram Shandy, nowadays; the inferiority of the homunculus is no mere matter of accident or interruption. How depressing some knowledge is, and how little philosophy betters the situation some discoveries bring about. Take such an example as this: a nice, sweet girl, full of physical attractiveness, grace, freshness, with a delicious disposition, fascinates you, you think of marriage. Somebody tells you the mother and grandmother both went mad. How much of a change in your admiration is produced by this simple fact. I saw this feeling put into practice. A Southern planter—splendid man!—was asked for his daughter’s hand by a gentleman of the neighbourhood, whose grandfather had committed a terrible crime. The young man was wealthy, accomplished, steady, brave, had the best of reputations and was liked by the girl. The father refused him frankly for the simple reason that he had in his veins some of the blood of a great criminal.
It must have struck you, if you have studied Buddhism—(not “esoteric Buddhism,” which is damnable charlatanism!)—how the tenets of that great faith are convertible into scientific truths in the transforming crucible of the new philosophy. The consequence of the crime or the sacrifice in the forming of the future personality; the heights attainable by discipline, of indifference to external things; the duty and holiness of the extinction of the Self; the monstrous allegory of the physical metempsychosis, which is the shadow of a tremendous truth; the supreme Buddha-hood which is the melting into the infinite life, light, knowledge, and the peace of the immensities: science gives an harmonious commentary upon all these, which it refuses to the more barbarous faith of the Occident. All that is noble in the Christianity, too much boasted of, belongs also to the older and vaster dream of the East—is perchance a dim reflection of it; the possibility of the invasion of the Oriental philosophy into the Occident seems to me worthy of consideration. In the meanwhile, it is unfortunate that such apes as the —— should parade their detestable macaqueries as Buddhism and obtain such hosts of hearers.
Speaking of the sexual sense being “such an infernal liar,” there are reasons that lead me to doubt whether it is all a liar. I think it never tells a physical lie. It only tells an ethical one. The physical memory of the most worthless woman that ever ensnared a man vibrates always afterward with a thrill of pleasure. But that is not really what I intended to say: I want to know if there be any scientific explanation of this fact. A woman wicked enough to tempt a man to cut his mother’s throat may have a peculiar physical magnetism. The touch of her hand in passing, the character of a look from her,—although she be ugly,—may be irresistible, damning. A good woman, beautiful, graceful, infinitely her physical superior, may have no such charm for the same man. Here is a mystery I cannot explain. This phenomenon is especially noticeable in the tropics, where differences of race and race mixture produce astounding sexual variations. Never was there a huger stupidity than the observation that “all women are in one respect alike.” On the contrary, in that one respect they differ infinitely, inexplicably, diabolically, fantastically.
L. H.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Mr. Gould,—I posted a letter, thanking you for two treatises so kindly sent, just before receiving your note. Be sure that I will find it no small pleasure to have a chat with a brother-thinker, if I find myself in Philadelphia this summer.
To the best of my recollection the book you speak of is a small, thin volume which only pretends to be a synopsis of the most gigantic of existing epics—the Mahabharata excepted. There are three complete translations of the colossal Ramayana:—The Italian version of Gorresio, I think in ten vols.; the French prose one by Hippolyte Fauche in nine, which I have read; and the exceedingly tiresome English translation (now O. P.) by Griffith, in Popish verse. It was, I think, on this last that “The Iliad of the East” was based—a very poor effort, artistically.
These epics are simply inexhaustible mines of folk-lore and legend,—like the Kathā-sarit-Sāgara. But one gets cloyed soon. It requires the patience of a Talmudist to work in these huge masses to get out a diamond or two. But diamonds there are. You know that mighty pantheistic hymn, the “Bhagavad-Gita,” is but a little fragment of the Mahabharata;—also the story of Nala, so beautifully translated by Monier Williams, Arnold, and the wonderful dead Hindoo girl, Toru Dutt, who wrote English and French as well as Hindustani and Sanscrit, made also some exquisite renderings. All you could wish for in this direction has not indeed been done; but it will take a hundred years to do it.
I am only a dilettante, not a linguist; and I only try to familiarize myself with the aspect of a national Idea as manifested in these epics. Some day I shall try to offer the public a little volume dealing with the Old Arabic spirit—pre-Islamic and post-Islamic. The poetry of the desert is Homeric. And I don’t know but that for pure natural poetry, the great Finnish Kalewala is not more wonderful than the Indian epics. When I made my brief renderings from the French edition of 1845, I was not familiar with the completion of the work by the labours of Loennrot.
Pardon long letter. You and I may have a good chance to talk these things over later on
Very cordially yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—At the time your letter reached me, the few proofs sent had been given away;—I have not many friends, of course, but I did not have many proofs either. The best I can therefore do is to send original photo. This is taking a liberty, I suppose, to send what wasn’t asked for; but it is the best I can do, and you can pitch it away if you don’t want it.
My novelette is done, and I am waiting to hear of its fate before starting. I am sure you will like it, and recognize a good deal of the scenery. I do not know how long I shall stay in New York;—might only stay a very short time, but quite long enough to see you once,—for a little while. Then again I might take a notion to stay in the North—don’t really know what I shall do.
What would be nice, if one could manage it, would be to live in the country, or in some vast wilderness, and ship one’s work away. But I fear that will only be possible when I have become Ancient as the Moon,—if I should ever become ancient
Very truly,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S. I met no more Hindoos here, but I met some other singular beings.
My last pet was a Chinese doctor, whose name I cannot pronounce. He tried to teach me Chinese; but I discovered nasal tones almost impossible to imitate,—snarling sounds like the malevolent outcries of contending cats.... “Gha!—ho-lha! Koum Yada! Gha! ghwang hwa!—yow sum!” Under the placid naïveté of a baby, my Chinese tutor concealed a marvellous comprehension of human motives and of human meannesses. He observed like a judge, and smiled always—always, with the eternal, half-compassionate, half-divine smile of the images of Fo.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1887.
Dear Krehbiel,—All that is now delaying me is news from the Harpers which I am waiting for. I have sent on my completed novelette,—an attempt at treatment of modern Southern life in the same spirit of philosophic romance as the “Ghosts” attempted to exemplify,—an effort to reach that something in the reader which they call Soul, God, or the Unknowable, according as the thought harmonizes with Christian, Pantheistic, or Spencerian ideas, without conflicting with any. Of course, I am a little anxious over this parturition;—have no idea how it is going to impress Alden. In a week from this date I expect to hear from him. Then I will be able to go.
Of course, New York is a horrible nightmare to me. I have been a demophobe for years,—dread crowds and hate unsympathetic characters most unspeakably. I have only been once to a theatre in New Orleans; to hear Patti sing, and I got out after she had sung one song. I can’t be much of a pleasure to any one. Here I visit a few friends steadily for a couple of months;—then disappear for six. Can’t help it;—just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,—to see no one except you and Joe. There are one or two I shall have to visit; but I shall take care to make those visits just before leaving town.
Your suggestion about the catalogue was so kind, that I don’t know how to thank you. What bothers me about it are the following points:—
1. If the collection is a large one, seems to me that each department should be entrusted to a specialist. Japanese armourers-work alone demands that. You know what Damascus-steel means in literary and scientific research; and the Japanese artisans surpassed the world in such work. Then porcelains, lacquers, inlaid work, pictured books, goldsmithery, etc. I know nothing about these things.
2. The Japanese expert may have simply confined himself to titles, dates, names;—or have made explanatory text as fitting and dry as possible. If he has, I don’t see how a unique catalogue could be made. The only way it could be made, I imagine, would be to make explanatory text picturesque and rich in anecdote; which would require immense reading, and purchase of many expensive books on the subject of art and history—De Rosny, Gonse, Metchnikoff, etc. Oriental art is one of the things I can never afford to study. It costs too much—the luxury of a rich dilettante.
3. Seems to me such a work would require at least six months to do at all, a whole year to do well. Don’t think I could afford to do it. I cannot write or read at night. If it were simply a question of translation and arrangement, it would be done soon; and I would need only a few technical and art treatises, some of which I already have....
I need rest and change a while,—not that I feel sick, but the continual fight with malaria leaves a fellow’s nerves terribly slack, like the over-strained chords of a—well, better leave the rest of the simile to you.... I don’t know whether the “Ghosts” walk; but I have been told it did me much good in Boston literary circles. The publishers voluntarily made a 5-years’—10 per cent—contract with me; but I have not heard from them. Notices were very contradictory outside of New York and Boston. Some said the stories were literal translations; others said they were fabrications, without any Chinese basis; others said the book was obscene; others called it “exquisitely spiritual,”—in short, the critics didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Three lines in the Atlantic consoled me amply for naughty Western criticism.
You may expect to hear definitely from me very soon,—at latest, I suppose, ten days
Affectionately,
L. Hearn.
Have you any idea how big a catalogue it ought to be?—if 100, 200, 300 pp. 16mo? Would it be indexed generally, or by departments,—duplex or single? Five pp. a day on such a job would be work. Then rewriting at rate of 10 pp. per day. All supposing that no research or elaborated treatment of incident were required,—only description and explanation.
I’ve had to open envelope to ask another question: Does he want the catalogue written in French? Because if he does, I wouldn’t attempt it. No one but a Frenchman, or some rare men like Rossetti and Swinburne can write artistic French. I can’t write French with delicacy and correctness.
Or does he simply want bad French turned into good English?
My experience is this. Translation—except for an artistic motive, and with ample leisure—never pays, either in self-satisfaction or anything else. Cataloguing, pure and simple, is the most terrible and tiresome of earthly labours;—first notebook and eyes; then arrangement of amplified notes by “a’s” and “b’s;” then enveloping or boxing, and pasting, then rewriting; then, O God!—the proofs!
I know how to do it, but it is so much life thrown away—so much thought-time made sterile. In this case the chief compensation would be opportunity to study the phases of Japanese art,—the esprit.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
New York, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—A small creature rang the bell at 136 Madison Avenue. A large and determined concierge responded, and the following converse ensued:—
S. C.—“Miss Bisland—?”
C.—“No, sir!”
S. C.—“Miss E-liz-a-beth Bisland—?”
C.—“No, sir!”
S. C.—“Isn’t this 136 Madison Avenue?”
C.—“Yes.—Used to live here.—Moved.”
S. C.—“Do you not know where—?”
C.—“No, sir.”
S. C.—“None of her friends or relatives here, who could tell me?”
C.—“No!”
The sudden closing of the door here made a Period and a Finis.
Then I wandered away down a double row of magnificent things that seemed less buildings than petrifactions,—astonishments of loftiness and silent power,—and wondered how Miss Elizabeth Bisland must have felt when she first trod these enormous pavements and beheld these colossal dreams of stone trying to touch the moon. And reaching my friend Krehbiel’s house I made this brief record of my vain effort to meet the grey eyes of E. B.
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
Saint-Pierre, Martinique, 1887.
Dear Krehbiel,—I was delighted to get your letter, the first which reached me from America during my trip. My own correspondence has been irregular, though I have written a good many short letters; but the amount of work on my hands has been something enormous,—and I have only had five idle days, caused by a fever due to imprudence. I got into a marshy town, got wet, and came home with a burning headache. The result was not serious except that I had to stop all writing for a while.
You ask me to send you a hint about my work; but I think it were best to say nothing about it. I have a very large mass of MS. prepared, and don’t yet know what I am going to do with it: it is not polished as I should wish, but I hope to work it into proper shape in a few days more. It consists simply of a detailed account of impressions, sensations, colours, etc. I have tried to put the whole feeling of the trip on paper. Then I have about $60 worth of photos to illustrate it. My photo set is very complete;—I have also a rich collection of Coolie and half-breed types, including many nude studies.
Strange as you may think it, this trip knocks the poetry out of me! The imagination is not stimulated, but paralyzed by the satiation of all its aspirations and the realization of its wildest dreams. The artistic sense is numbed by the display of colours which no artist could paint; and the philosophical sense is lulled to inactivity by the perpetual current of novel impressions, by the continual stream of unfamiliar sensory experiences. Concentration of mind is impossible.
It pleases me, however, to have procured material for stories, which I can write up at home; and for romantic material the West Indies offer an unparalleled field of research. I shall return to them again at my earliest opportunity;—the ground is absolutely untilled, and it is not in the least likely that anybody in the shape of a Creole is ever going to till it.
SAINT-PIERRE AND MT. PELÉE BEFORE THE ERUPTION
By this time you will have seen the doll. I want to remind you that this is more than a doll; it is really an artistic model of the dress worn by the women of Martinique,—big earrings and all. The real earrings and necklaces are pure gold; the former worth 175 francs a pair; the latter often running as high as 500, 600, even 900 francs.
In case this reaches you before leaving New York, I hope you will be able to make some arrangement with Joe or somebody, so that I can put my things in a place of safety for a day or two, until I can try to arrange matters with the Harpers. I will be obliged to stay a short while in New York,—and shall want a room badly, until my MS. and photos have been disposed of, and my proof-reading has been done on “Chita.” With affectionate regards to all,
Very truly yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S. I return with the Barracouta.
My inquiries about the Marimba and other instruments have produced no result except the discovery that our negroes play the guitar, the flute, the flageolet, the cornet-à-piston! Some play very well; all the orchestras and bands are coloured. But the civilized instrument has killed the native manufacture of aboriginalities. The only hope would be in the small islands, or where slavery still exists, as in Cuba, There are one or two African songs still current, but they are sung to the tam-tam—
Welleli, welleli,
hm, hm!
Papa mon ce papa mon
hm, hm!
Welleli, welleli,
hm, hm!
Maman mon ce maman mon
hm, hm!
Welleli, etc.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Georgetown, Demerara, July, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—I suppose you will have just a tiny little bit of curiosity to know about my impressions here? They have been all flavoured with that enchanting sensation which artists term surprise. The effect upon me has been such that I think the North will always look torpid to me,—as a benumbed and livid part of our planet. Nearly all these isles are volcanic; and this largely accounts for the green and purple symmetry of their shapes. The colours are of the kind called "impossible;”—and the days have such an azure expansion, so enormous a luminosity that it does not really seem to be our sky above, but the heaven of some larger world.
That’s all I can attempt to say about it now (in a general way) without wearying you.
Imagine old New Orleans, the dear quaint part of it, young and idealized as a master-artist might idealize it,—made all tropical, with narrower and brighter streets, all climbing up the side of a volcanic peak to a tropical forest, or descending in terraces of steps to the sea;—fancy our Creole courts filled with giant mangoes and columnar palms (a hundred feet in height sometimes); and everything painted in bright colours, and everybody in a costume of more than Oriental picturesqueness;—and astonishments of half-breed beauty;—and a grand tepid wind enveloping the city in one perpetual perfumed caress,—fancy all this, and you may have a faint idea of the sweetest, queerest, darlingest little city in the Antilles: Saint-Pierre, Martinique. I hope it will be my residence for the next two months,—and for the latter part of my wretched little existence. I love it as if it were a human being.
Outside are queer little French islands, with queer names—Marie Galante is rather an old appellation for an island,—full of Cytherean suggestion.
We leave this very fantastic and unhealthy land—now smitten with Gold-fever as well as other maladies—to-morrow. Then will come Trinidad, with its Hindoo villages to see. Photos, bought at Demerara and St. Kitts, predict visions of Indian grace worth daring the perpendicular sun to see. I am now the only passenger. My last companion—a fine Northwestern man—goes, I fear, to leave his bones in the bush. From the interior men are being carried back to the coast to die, yet the stream pours on to the gold-mines. My miner thinks he can stand it: he has dug for African gold, under a fiercer sky. He was an odd fellow. Saw no beauty in these islands. “No, partner—if you want to see scenery see the Rockies: that’s something to look at! Even the sea’s afraid of them mountains,—ran away from them: you can see four thousand feet up where the sea tried to climb before it got scared!”
Sometimes the apes on board are taught the experiences of life, the advantages of civilization. Torpedoes are tied to their tails; fire-crackers surround them with circles of crepitation and flame. Also they are occasionally paralyzed by unexpected sensations of electricity;—they have made the acquaintance of a galvanic battery; they have been induced to do foolish things which resulted in sharp and unfamiliar pains and burnings. Their lives are astonishments, and prolonged spasms of terror.
The sea at night is an awful and magnificent sight. It looks infernal,—Acherontic;—black surges that break into star-spray;—an abyss full of moving lights that come and go.
Well, I can’t write a good letter now;—wait till I get back to Martinique. I wanted you to know I had not forgotten my promise to write. You must make a trip down here some day. It is not hotter than New York except in the sun. You can do whatever you wish. You have force to do it. You have more brains in your finger-tips than some who have managed to get a big reputation. The little talk about Grande Isle that night was an absolute poem,—gave me a sense of the charm of the place such as I felt the first beautiful morning there. You don’t know what you can do, if you want to.
I think I should do something with this novel material, it is so rich in absurd colour! But I don’t feel enthusiastic now. Enthusiasm has been numbed by a long series of violent sensations and unexpected experiences. I have artistic indigestion;—going to try to dream it away at divine, paradisaical Martinique. There I will write you again. My address will be, care American Consul. But you mustn’t write unless you have plenty of time;—I am only paying my debts, not trying to make you waste paper answering me.
I believe I am beginning to write absurdities: it is so hot that rain-clouds form in one’s head.
Good-bye, believe the best you can of me
Your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Saint-Pierre, Martinique, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—I am settled here for at least a month:—wish I could settle here forever. I love this quaint, whimsical, wonderfully-coloured little town,—all its ups and downs, vistas of azure harbour and overshadowing volcanic hills,—all the stones that whisper under the myriad naked feet of this fantastic population. It pleases me to find my affection for it is not merely inspiration: the place has fascinated more than one practical American,—persuaded them to abandon ambitions, contests, popular esteem, friends, society,—and to settle here for the rest of their days, in delightful indolence and dreamy content.
In my trunk I have something for you: a Coolie girl’s bracelet. It will not look so well on your arm as on hers, because its effect depends on a background of dark colour; and all this clumsy Indian jewelry is inartistically wrought. It is indeed made chiefly for economical reasons. Coolies so carry their wealth;—I saw one Hindoo wife with some $900 worth of jewelry upon her.
In the little Coolie village near Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I sat, and looked at rudely painted Indian gods, while waiting for the silversmith to sit down before his ridiculous little anvil. All the palm-shadows, intensely black, crawled outside like tarantulas; it was a glowing day,—blindingly blue: the light of a larger sun seemed to fill the world,—a white sun,—Sirius!
“Ra!” called out the Coolie smith when I told him I wanted to look at his jewelry;—and his wife came in. She wore the Hindoo garb without the long veils: a white robe like a Greek chiton, or rather like a lady’s chemise,—leaving the arms and ankles bare, and confined about the waist. I thought her very lovely,—slender and delicate,—a perfect bronze-colour: the gold-flower attached to the nostril did not impair the symmetry of the face;—extraordinary eyes and teeth. She held out her pretty round arms for examination: there were about ten silver rings upon each: the two outer ones being round, the inner eight being flat. The arm was infinitely prettier than the bracelets;—I selected one ring, and the smith opened and removed it with an iron instrument and gave it me. It had a faint musky odour: perhaps that was why the smith insisted on putting it into an absurdly small furnace, and purifying it after the Indian manner.
I wanted to buy a pair of baby bracelets;—so they brought in the baby,—a girl, and therefore (?) having a dress on. The little babies of the other sex wear nothing but circles of silver on arms and ankles. Sometimes the custom is extended; for the little wife who carried her girl baby to the post-office when I was at Demerara, carried it naked at her hip in the most primitive manner.
This Trinidad baby had absurdly large eyes,—looked supernatural: the mother’s eyes magnified. She held up her little arms and I chose two rings. Then she talked to me in—Creole patois! It is the commercial dialect of the poor; and the Hindoos learn it well
Always truly,
Lafcadio Hearn.
There are palms here over 200 feet high. There are fish here of all the colours of marsh-sunset.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Fort de France, Martinique, July, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—Imagine yourself turned into marble, all white,—robed after the fashion of the Directory,—standing forever on a marble pedestal, under an enormous azure day,—encircled by a ring of tall palms, graceful as Creole women,—and gazing always, always, over the summer sea, toward emerald Trois Islets.
That is Josephine! I think she looks just like you, “Mamzelle Josephine,”—or Zefine, if you like.
I want to tell you a little story about her,—just a little anecdote somebody told me on the street, which I want to develop into a sketch next week.
It was after the fall of the Second Empire,—after France felt the iron heel of Germany upon her throat.
Far off in this delicious little Martinique, the Republican rage made itself felt;—the huge reaction passed over the ocean like a magnetic current. So it happened, in a little while, that the Martinique politicians resolved to do that which had already been done in France,—to obliterate the memories of the Empire.
There was Mamzelle Zefine, par exemple!... They put a rope round her beautiful white neck. They prepared to destroy the statue.
Then Somebody rang the Church-bell—(you ought to see the sleepy little church: it makes you want to doze the moment you pass into its cool shadow). A vast crowd gathered in the Savane.
It was a crowd of women,—mostly women who had been slaves,—quadroons, mulattoesses; the house-servants, the bonnes, the nurses and housekeepers of the old days. (You could form no possible idea of this coloured Creole element without seeing it: it does not exist in New Orleans.) They gathered to defend Mamzelle Zefine.
When the Republican officials came with their workmen at sunrise, Mamzelle Zefine was still gazing toward Trois Islets; she was white as ever; her pure cold passionate face just as lovely: she seemed totally indifferent to what was about to happen,—she was dreaming her eternal plaintive dream.
But she could well afford to feel indifferent! About her, under the circle of the palms, surged a living sea,—a tide of angry yellow faces, above which flashed the lightning of cane-knives, axes, couteaux de boucher. “Ah! li vieu!—lâches! cafa’ds! pott’ons! Vos pas cabab toucher li! Touché li—yon tête fois!—Osé toucher li. Capons Républicains! Osé toucher li!“
Mamzelle Zefine still gazed plaintively toward Trois Islets. She must have seemed to that yellow population to live;—for each one she represented some young mistress, some petted child, some memory of the old colonial days. And all the love of the slave for the master—all the strange passionate senseless affection of the servant for the Creole family—was stirred to storm by the mere idea of the proposed desecration. The man who should have dared to lay an evil finger upon Josephine that day would have been torn limb from limb in the public square. The officials were frightened and foiled: they pledged their faith that the statue should not be touched.
So they took the ropes away; and they piled flowers at Mamzelle Zefine’s white feet; they garlanded her; they twined the crimson jessamines of the tropics about her beautiful white throat.
And she is still here,—always in the circle of the palms, always looking to Trois Islets, always beautiful and sweet as a young Creole maiden,—dreamy, gracious, loving,—with a smile that is like some faint, sweet memory of other days.
Always,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
New York, 1887.
Dear Miss Bisland,—Thanks for the gracious little letter. I wish I could see you, and see other friends; but fate forbids. Distances are too enormous; engagements imperative; preparations for coming journey made my head whirl. For I return to the tropics, dear Miss Bisland,—probably forever: I imagine that civilization will behold me no more, except as a visitor at very long intervals. I would like to write you sometimes, praying only that my letters be not ever shown unto newspaper people. You will hear from me soon again. I am off on Friday afternoon, and have not even the necessary time to do what I ought to do in the mere matter of exceedingly small purchases, outfits, etc.
Good-bye, with best regards and something a little more, too.
Lafcadio Hearn.
I have not seen Krehbiel at all,—was out of town when I returned, and seems to have found no time afterwards.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
New York, 1887.
Your letter reached me just at a time when everything that had seemed solid was breaking up, and substance had become Shadow. It made me very foolish,—made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don’t think it is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the Unknown for Art’s sake—or rather, you must obey them. The Spahi’s fascination by the invisible Forces was purely physical. I think I am right in going: perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance compelling another change.
The carriage—no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or sentimentality about these!)—is waiting to take me to Pier 49, East River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I shan’t put anybody’s name to it.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Saint-Pierre, Martinique, May, 1888.
Dear Gould,—One of your letters, I think a P. Cd., many months ago, caught me in British Guiana, another to-day finds me here. I left N. O. in June, 1887, and have been travelling since, or at least sojourning in these tropics. I have been sick, too,—have had some trouble fighting the influences of climate, trouble in trying to carry out large plans with absurdly small resources; and have been unable to do my friends justice. How could you think I could have been offended? It was only the other day, in a letter to the editor of Harper’s, that I referred to one of your delightful colour-theories.
Praise from you I value very highly. As to impress such a mind as yours means to me a great pride and pleasure. I am delighted “Chita” pleased you.
I have written a number of sketches on the West Indies,—some of which may appear in a few months, others later on. It has been a hope of mine to make a unique book on these strange Hesperides, with their singularly mixed races; but I don’t know whether I shall be able to carry the project out.
The climate is antagonistic to work. It is a benumbing power, rendering concentrated thought almost out of the question. I can now understand why the tropics have produced so little literature.
We are quarantined and isolated for the present by a long epidemic of small-pox, which among these populations means something as fatal as an Oriental plague. The whites are exempt. But the disease, although on the decline, still prevails to an extent rendering it doubtful when I can get away from here.
I would like much to hear from you when you have time. I am temporarily settled here, and everything goes well enough now, so that I can write regularly
With best affection,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Grand Anse, Martinique, June, 1888.
Dear Dr. Gould,—I am writing you from an obscure, pretty West Indian village, seldom visited by travellers. Tall palms, and a grand roaring sea, blue as lapis lazuli in spite of its motion.
I was certainly even more pleased to hear from you than you could have been at the receipt of my letter;—for in addition to the intellectual and sympathetic pleasure of such a correspondence, the comparative rarity of friendly missives, enhancing their value, lends them certain magnetism difficult to describe,—the sensation, perhaps, of that North, and that Northern vigour of mind which has made the world what it is, and that pure keen air full of the Unknowable Something which has made the Northern Thought.
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 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 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 actually 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 at 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 very 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; for I will certainly call on you in Philadelphia some day.
I would not hesitate, if I were you, to begin the magnum opus;—the only time to hesitate would be when it is all complete, before giving to the printer. Then one may perhaps commune with one’s self to advantage upon the question of what might be gained or lost by waiting for more knowledge through fresh expansions of science. But the true way to attempt an enduring work is to begin it as a duty, without considering one’s self in the matter at all, but the subject only,—which you love more and more the longer you caress it, and find it taking form and colour and beauty with the patient years.
I am horribly ignorant about scientific matters; but sometimes the encouragement of a layman makes the success of the prelate.
Now, replying to your question about “Chita.” “Chita” was founded on the fact of a child saved from the Lost Island disaster by some Louisiana fisher-folk, and brought up by them. Years after a Creole hunter recognized her, and reported her whereabouts to relatives. These, who were rich, determined to bring her up as young ladies are brought up in the South, and had her sent to a convent. But she had lived the free healthy life of the coast, and could not bear the convent;—she ran away from it, married a fisherman, and lives somewhere down there now,—the mother of multitudinous children.
And about my work, I can only tell you this:—I will have two illustrated articles on a West Indian trip in the Harper’s Monthly soon,—within four or five months. These will be followed by brief West Indian sketches. Other sketches, not suited for the magazine, will go to form a volume to be published later on. I do not correspond or write for any newspaper, and I would always let you know in advance where anything would be published written by me.
You know what the nervous cost of certain imaginative work means; and this sort of work I do not think I shall be able to do here. One has no vital energy to spare in such a climate. I cannot read Spencer here,—gave up the “Biology” (vol. II) in despair. But I did not miss the wonderful page about the evolution of the eye—hair—snail-horn—etc., etc.... I want to see anything you write that I can understand, with my limited knowledge of scientific terms and facts. And when you write again, tell me what you said of Loti in the letter I never received. Did you read his “Roman d’un Spahi”? I thought you would like it. If you do not, let me know why,—because Loti has had much literary influence upon me, and I want to know his faults as well as his merits. With love to you,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Saint-Pierre, Martinique, August, 1888.
Dear Gould,—Many thanks for the quid!—the surprising quid. I have been waiting to send you the quo, which I do not like so well as one taken in New Orleans, of which I have no copy within reach. But before I tell you anything about the quo, I ought to scold you for your startling deception. I pictured you as a much younger man than myself—although quite conscious of meeting an intelligence much more virile and penetrating than my own, and with an experience of life larger: this did not, however, astonish me; for whatever qualities I have lie only in that one direction which pleased you and won your friendship,—moreover, I had met several much younger men than myself, my mental superiors in every respect. But, all of a sudden you come upon me with such a revelation of your personality as makes me half afraid of you. I perceive that your envergure is much larger than I imagined:—I mean, of course, the mental spread-of-wing; and then your advice and suggestions, while manifesting your ability to teach me much in my own line, resemble only those proffered by old experienced masters in literary guidance. It is exactly the advice of Alden, among one or two others.
Now about the quo. I am about five feet three inches high, and weigh about 137 pounds in good health;—fever has had me down to 126. Nothing phthisical,—36¾ inches round the chest, stripped. Was born in June (27th), 1850, in Santa Maura (the antique Leucadia), of a Greek mother. My father, Dr. Charles Bush Hearn, who spent most of his life in India, was surgeon-major of the 76th British regiment (now merged in West Riding Battalion). Do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead;—was last heard of (remarried) in Smyrna, about 1858-9. My father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history of my father’s marriage. It is not, however, of the sort to interest you in a letter. 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.
Your advice about story-writing is capital; I am not so sure about your suggestion of plot. I cannot believe—in view of the extraordinary changes (changes involving even the whole osseous structure) wrought in the offspring of Europeans or foreigners within a single generation by the tropical climate—that anything of the parental moral character on the father’s side would survive with force sufficient to produce the psychical phenomena you speak of. In temperate climates these do survive astonishingly, even through generations; in the tropics, Nature moulds every new being at once into perfect accord with environment, or else destroys it. The idea you speak of occurred to me also; it was abandoned after a careful study of tropical conditions. It could only be used on an inverse plot,—transporting the tropical child to the North. At least, I think so, with my present knowledge on the subject,—which might be vastly improved, no doubt....
About story-writing, dear friend, you ought to know I would like to be able to do nothing else. But even in these countries, where life is so cheap, I could not make the pot—or as they call it here, the canari—boil by story-writing until I gain more literary success, and can obtain high prices. A story takes at least ten or twelve months to write, that is, a story of the length of “Chita.” Suppose it brings only $500,—half as much as you will soon be able to obtain for a single operation! It is pretty hard to live even in the tropics on that sum. I must write sketches too. They do me other good also, involve research I might otherwise neglect. I have prepared some twelve sketches in all, which obligated investigation that will prove invaluable for a forthcoming novelette.
I like your firm, strong, sonorous letter, better than anything of the sort I ever received. The only thing I did not relish in it was the suggestion that I should prepare a lecture, or make an appearance before a private club. I would not do it for anything! I shrink from real life, however, not at all because I am pessimistic. 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 lose much knowledge, but I escape pains which, in spite of all your own knowledge, you could not wholly comprehend, for the simple reason that you can mingle with men. By the way, it is no small disadvantage in life to be 5 ft. 3 in. high. I remember observing, at a great gathering of American merchant princes, that the small or insignificant looking men present might have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Success in life still largely depends upon the power to impose respect, the reserve of mere physical force; since the expansion of everybody’s individuality—at the expense of everybody else’s individuality—is still the law of existence.
I am not yet sure what I am going to do. One thing certain is that I am to go to South or to Central America—for monetary reasons. I may linger here long enough to finish a novelette. If not able to do so, I will perhaps be in New York before December. I left it October 2, 1887, after a stay of only three weeks, to return to the tropics. It was then impossible to visit Philadelphia. Should I go to the Continent from here, you will know at least six weeks in advance.
Thanks for the superb paper on Loti. I cannot imagine anything much finer in the way of literary analysis. But what does James want?—evolution to leap a thousand years? What he classes as sensual perceptions must be sensitized and refined supernally,—fully evolved and built up before the moral ones, of which they are the physiological foundations, pedestals. Granting the doubt as to the ultimate nature of Mind, it is still tolerably positive that its development—so far as man is concerned—follows the development of the nervous system; and that very sensuousness which at once delights and scandalizes James, rather seems to me a splendid augury of the higher sensitiveness to come, in some future age of writers and poets,—the finer “sensibility of soul,” whose creative work will caress the nobler emotions more delicately than Loti’s genius ever caressed the senses of colour and form and odour.
You ask about my idea of Whitman? I have not patience for him,—not as for Emerson. Enormous suggestiveness in both, rather than clear utterance. I used to like John Weiss better than Emerson. Then there is a shagginess, an uncouthness, a Calibanishness about Whitman that repels. He makes me think of some gigantic dumb being that sees things, and wants to make others see them, and cannot for want of a finer means of expression than Nature gives him. But there is manifest the rude nobility of the man,—the primitive and patriarchal soul-feeling to men and the world. Whitman lays a Cyclopean foundation on which, I fancy, some wonderful architect will yet build up some marvellous thing.... Yes, there is nonsense in Swinburne, but he is merely a melodist and colourist. He enlarges the English tongue,—shows its richness, unsuspected flexibility, admirable sponge-power of beauty-absorption. He is not to be despised by the student.
Let me pray you not to make mention of anything written to you thus, even incidentally, to newspaper folk—or to any literary folk who would not be intimate friends. There are reasons, more than personal, for this suggestion, acceptance of which would remove any check on frankness
Best love to you, from
Lafcadio Hearn.
Speaking of Whitman, I must add that my idea of him is not consciously stable. It has changed within some years. What I like, however, was not Whitman exactly,—rather the perception of something Whitman feels, and disappoints by his attempted expression of.
After closing letter I remember you wanted to know about illustrations in magazine. They are after photos. I am sorry to say incorrect use has been made of several: the types published as Sacratra were not Sacratra, but in two cases half-breed Coolie,—one seemingly of Southern India, showing a touch of Malay. There were other errors. It is horrible not to be able to correct one’s own work,—on account of irregularities in mail involved by quarantine. In the December number you will see a study of a peculiar class of young girls here. If you want, yourself, to have some particular photo of some particular thing, send word, and I will try to get it for you.
I can only work here of mornings. Nobody dreams of eating before noon: all rise with the sun. After 2 P.M., the heat and weight of the air make thinking impossible. Your head gets heavy, as if there was lead in it, and you sleep.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Saint-Pierre, Martinique,
October, 1888.
Dear Friend Gould,—I have read your delightful letter,—also, the delightful essays of James you so kindly sent me. I suspect James has not his equal as a literary chemist: the analyses of his French contemporary, Lemaître, are far less qualitative. You have made me know him as a critic;—I had only known him as a novelist. My work has been poor; it has been condensed and recondensed for the magazine till all originality has been taken out of it; finally I never had a chance to revise it in proof. I believe I have temporarily lost all creative power: it will come back to me, perhaps, when I inhale some Northern ozone.
I would like to call your attention to the article by Loti in Fortnightly Review—“Un Rêve,” a delicious little psychological phenomenon. Have you seen “Madame Chrysanthemum”—wonderfully illustrated!
Are you perfectly, positively sure there is really a sharp distinction between moral and physical sensibilities? I doubt it. I suspect what we term the finer moral susceptibilities signify merely a more complex and perfect evolution of purely physical sensitiveness. The established distinction simply seems to me that “moral” feelings are those into which the sexual instinct does not visibly enter, or those in which some form of desire, some form of egotism, does not predominate at the cost of justice to others. There is a queer vagueness about all definitions of the moral sense. When one’s physical sensibilities are fully developed and properly balanced, I do not think wickedness to others possible. The cruel and the selfish are capable of doing what is called wrong, because they are ignorant of the suffering inflicted. Thorough consciousness of the result of acting forms morality, if morality is self-restraint, self-sacrifice, incapacity to injure unnecessarily;—one who understands pain does not give it. Of course, I am not a believer in free will. I do not believe in the individual soul,—though in the manifestations of a universal human, or divine, soul, I am inclined to believe, or to have that doubt which almost admits of belief. What offends in certain writings, I suppose, is the feeling that the writer’s faculties are not perfectly balanced,—that certain senses are so much more developed than others that one can suspect him of yielding to cruelties of egotism. Perhaps I may say that I would call moral feelings, as distinguished from those termed physical, the sensitiveness of perception of suffering in others,—of the consequences of acts. But can those be thoroughly developed before those which conduce to self-preservation? I imagine the reverse to be the case. By the super-refinement of the earlier sensations comes the capacity for the “higher sentiments.” It is true that moral standards are very old, but those existing are also very defective. Evolutionally, egotism must precede altruism;—altruism itself being only a sort of double reflex action of egotism.—All this is very badly written; but you can catch the idea I am trying to express.
When you think of tropical Nature as cruel and splendid, like a leopard, I fancy the Orient, which is tropical largely, dominates the idea. Humanity has a great beauty in these tropics, a great charm,—that of childishness, and the goodness of childishness. As for the mysterious Nature, which is the soul of the land, it was understood by the ancient Mexicans, whose goddess of flowers, Coatlicue, was robed in a robe of serpents interwoven. She is rich in death as in life, this Nature, and lavish of both. I would love her; but I fear she is an enemy of the mind,—a hater of mental effort.
No, indeed, I did not laugh at your experiences. I have had nearly as multiform; but mine were less successful,—I was less fitted for them. I have not your advantages, nor capacities. I never learned German. It is only in America such careers are possible. I wish I could have finished like you, as a physician; for I hold, that with the modern development of medicine as an enormous interbranching system of science and philosophy, the physician is the only perfect man, mentally. Like those old Arabian physicians who affected to treat the soul, the modern knows the mind, the reason of actions, the source of impulses,—which must make him the most generous of men to the faults of others.
I don’t like your plot for a medical novel at all. It involves ugliness. I believe in Théophile Gautier’s idea of art, study only the beautiful;—create only ideals, therefore. You are not a realist, I am sure. Then your plot is too thin. It has not the beauty nor depth of that simple narrative about a famous painter, or writer,—I forget which,—whose imagination rendered it impossible for him to complete his medical studies. Shapes impressed themselves upon his brain as on the brain of an artist: vividly to painfulness. He was in love, engaged to be married; under the peach flesh and behind the velvet gaze, he always saw the outlined skull, the empty darkness of void orbits. He had to abandon medicine for art. A very powerful short sketch might be made of this fact.
I believe in a medical novel,—a wonderful medical novel. We must chat about it. Why not use a fantastic element,—anticipate discoveries hoped for,—anticipate them so powerfully as to make the reader believe you are enunciating realities?
Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it. It would have to be sexual. Never could you 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 the love that is a fear. I don’t think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half a compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive—pregnant with future pains innumerable.
I don’t know why you hold the work of Spencer, etc., more colourless than those of the other philosophers and scientists whom you have studied—all except beastly Hegel: there is an awful poetry to me in the revelation of which these men are the mouthpieces, as much vaster than the old thoughts as the foam of suns in the via lactea is vaster than the spume of a wave on the sea-beach. Wallace I know only as a traveller and naturalist; is it the same Wallace? I am very fond of him too: he is very human, fraternal: he is not like God the Father as Spencer is. I suppose what we need is God the Holy Ghost. He is not yet come.
Flower, who wrote that interesting little book “Fashion in Deformity” and many other excellent things, could find some good texts here. I am convinced now that most of our fashions are deformities; that grace is savage, or must be savage in order to be perfect; that man was never made to wear shoes; that in order to comprehend antiquity, the secret of Greek art, one must know the tropics a little (so much has fashion invaded the rest of the world), and that the question of more or less liberty in the sex relation is like the tariff question—one of localities and conditions, scarcely to be brought under a general rule.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Saint-Pierre, Martinique,
February, 1889.
Dear Gould,—A letter to you has been lying on my desk for months unfinished,—I can only just gum the envelope and let it go as it is. I am obliged at intervals—thank Goodness, only at very long ones—to let all correspondence, even the most important, wait a little or risk the results of interrupting a work which exacts all one’s thinking time during waking hours. This has been partly my case,—having just completed a novelette; but I have also had a good deal of trouble about other matters that left me no chance to do anything until now. I am free again,—I hope for a good long time.
Meanwhile I received your pamphlets, and read every one with more pleasure than you could readily believe a non-scientific man could feel in them. Of course, those which interested me most were:
1. That on the Homing Instinct (a much better word than the French orientation). 2. That on the electric light. My first experience with the light was painful; then I learned to like it (the white, not the yellow) very much and found gaslight intensely disagreeable afterward. By the way, do you correspond with Romanes, who solicits correspondence on the subject of animals? You know him, of course, the author of “Animal Intelligence” and “Mental Evolution in Animals.” A man like that ought to be delighted with such a splendid and powerful suggestion as that of your pamphlet. I hope you are not too patriotic to think you cannot do better with a scientific suggestion abroad than at home. There are certain things that seem to me too worthy to remain buried in the archives of a medical society,—which ought to reach a larger scientific circle through a more eclectic medium, such as that of the superb foreign reviews, devoted to what used to be called natural history, but for which the term has long ago become too small. Still I am sure you must have heard from your paper on the homing instinct if the publication in which it appeared reached the quarters it ought to have reached.
I don’t know what to tell you about myself. Since October last I have been buried in my room—facing, happily, a semi-circle of Mornes curving away into a sea like lapis lazuli—and have neither heard nor seen anything else. We had an epidemic of yellow fever which carried away many Europeans and strangers; but it is over, and the weather is delightful, if you can call weather delightful which keeps you drenched in perspiration from morning to night, and forces you to lie down and sleep in the afternoon if you dare attempt to write or read. The difficulty of work in such a climate only those who have had the experience can understand. I think my case is an experiment; almost a phenomenon,—and I am very curious to know the result by the verdict upon my work. I cannot judge it myself here. What at sundown seems good in the morning appears damnably bad; and I was obliged to give every page a test of three or four days’ waiting. My novelette made itself out of an incident related to me about a case of heroism during a great negro revolt.
There is no question but that I shall be in New York this summer, for a while. It is imperative. I have to oversee work before it can be published;—that which already appeared was in terribly bad shape on account of my not having seen the proofs. Then I may be getting out a little book.
Did you see the incident in regard to the admission of a remarkable young lady doctor into the profession by the faculty of Paris,—the remarks of Charcot and others? I thought of your medical novel. There were some remarks very suggestive made. The thesis of the candidate was the position and duty of woman as a physician. You know what those French are, and what peculiar ways they have of looking at the question of women as physicians;—the Paris papers made all kinds of observations scabreuses; but the dignity of the girl carried her splendidly through the ordeal—an ordeal to which Americans would never put a female student.
I have a curious compilation,—“Etudes pathologiques et historiques sur l’origine et la propagation de la Fièvre Jaune” (1886),—perhaps you know it already,—by Dr. Cornilliac of Martinique. If you do not know it I will send it you from New York. It contains a great deal of valuable matter regarding the climate of the West Indies, and formative influences of that climate on races and temperament. Martinique has had several physicians of colonial celebrity,—how great I cannot estimate, being ignorant of their comparative value; but some of them have a decided charm as writers and historians. Such was Rufz de Lavison, author of a delightful history of the colony, and a work upon the trigonocephalus, which would not bear equal praise, I fancy. If you want any information about medical matters in Martinique, I will hunt it up for you.
I hope to see you and have a great chat with you. But the heat is great, and there is an accumulation of letters to answer, and you will forgive me for saying for the moment good-bye
Your sincere friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
Saint-Pierre, Martinique,
April, 1889.
Dear Gould,—I read your pamphlets with intense pleasure: that on the effect of reflex neurosis, of course, impressed me only as a curious research; but your paper on dreams, full of truth and suggestive beauty, had much more than a scientific interest for me. There is a world of poetical ideas and romantic psychology evoked by its perusal. I wonder only that you did not dwell more upon the softness, sweetness, impalpable goodness of this dream-world in which everything—even what we usually think wrong—seems to be right. Doubtless all man’s dreams of paradise, of a golden past age, or a perfect future, were born of the thin light vanishing sensations of dream. The work of Gautier cited by you—“Avatar”—was my first translation from the French. I never could find a publisher for it, however, and threw the MS. away at last in disgust. It is certainly a wonderful story; but the self-styled Anglo-Saxon has so much damnable prudery that even this innocent phantasy seems to shock his sense of the “proper.”
You will be pleased to hear my novelette has been a success with the publishers. It cost me terrible work in this continual heat, small as it is; and I feel so mentally blank that I must get back to the States for a while to seek some vitality, brighten whatever blood I have got left after two years of tropical air.
If you could find me in Philadelphia a very quiet room where I could write without noise for a few months, I would try my luck there. New York is stupefying; I know too many people there; and I want to be very quiet,—only to see a friend or two now and then, when I am in good trim for a chat. I shall return to the West Indies in the winter.
Address me if you have time to write c/o H. M. Alden, Edr. Harper’s Magazine;—for I shall have left Martinique, doubtless, by the time this reaches you.
Faithfully,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO JOSEPH TUNISON
New York, 1889.
Dear Joe,—By the time this reaches you I shall have disappeared.
The moment I get into all this beastly machinery called “New York,” I get caught in some belt and whirled around madly in all directions until I have no sense left. This city drives me crazy, or, if you prefer, crazier; and I have no peace of mind or rest of body till I get out of it. Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathematics and geometry and enigmatics and riddles and confusion worse confounded: architecture and mechanics run mad. One has to live by intuition and move by steam. I think an earthquake might produce some improvement. The so-called improvements in civilization have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see, hear, or find anything out. You are improving yourselves out of the natural world. I want to get back among the monkeys and the parrots, under a violet sky among green peaks and an eternally lilac and lukewarm sea,—where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an exertion,—where everybody sleeps 14 hours out of the 24. This is frightful, nightmarish, devilish! Civilization is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery! Surely a palm 200 feet high is a finer thing in the natural order than seventy times seven New Yorks. I came in by one door as you went out at the other. Now there are cubic miles of cut granite and iron fury between us. I shall at once find a hackman to take me away. I am sorry not to see you—but since you live in hell what can I do? I will try to find you again this summer.
Best affection,
L. H.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
Dear Miss Bisland,—A week ago in New York I was asking a friend where you were, but could then obtain no satisfactory information without taking steps I had no time to attempt. I was really glad to get out of the frightful whirl and roar of modern improvements as soon as possible, but regretted not seeing you, even while assured of being able to do so before long.
It is true I have been silent with my friends: I did not write seven letters in seventeen months,—not even business letters. It was very difficult to write anything in the continuous enervating heat; and I had to struggle with difficulties of the most unlooked for sort, incessantly,—until I found correspondence become almost impossible. But I thought of you very often; and wondered if you were still in that terrible metropolis. I saw in Max O’Rell’s book some lines about a charming young lady and thought it must have been you.... I returned on the 8th from Martinique.
Dr. Matas sent me your pretty eulogy of “Chita”—which I often re-read afterward, and which gave me encouragement when I began to doubt whether I could do anything else.... I don’t think I shall write another story in the same manner,—feel I have changed very much in my way of looking at things and of writing. “Chita” will soon be sent to you in book form as a souvenir of Grande Isle: it is not as short a story as it looked in the serried type of Harper’s—will make a volume of 225 pp. I will have something else to send you, however, that will interest you more as to novelty,—a volume of tropical sketches.
I wonder whether you could ever throw upon paper the thoughts you uttered to me that evening I visited you nearly two years ago,—when you said why you liked Grande Isle. In your few phrases you said much that I had been trying to express and could not,—at least it so seemed to me.... I have seen a great many strange beaches since; but nothing like the morning charm of Grande Isle ever revealed itself. I wonder if I were to see it now, whether I should feel the same pleasure....
Thanks for those verses!—there is a large, strong, strange beauty in them. There seems, you know, to be just now a straining-up of eyes to look for some singer able to prophesy,—to chant even one hymn of that cosmic faith that is stealing upon the world
Affectionately your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
Dear Miss Bisland,—Oh! what a stiff epistle, with a little sharp pointing of reproach twisting about in the tail of every letter! Really you must never, never feel vexed at anything I write:—I wrote you just as I wrote to Mr. Stedman about the same matter. I feel the man sometimes is much less than the work: my work, however weak, is so much better than myself, that the less said about me the better,—then there are so many things you do not know. As for you not liking personalities, that is a very different thing! Your own personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable. But I am sure, now, from your letter anything you say will be nice,—though I think it would have been better not to have said it. Does a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his book? I could not get out of the Harper plan for an article on Southern writers, without hurting myself otherwise; but the candid truth is that I felt like yelling when I saw the thing—howling and screeching! Indeed I think that my belief in the invisible personality of a man has been largely forced by my thorough disgust with the visible personality. Schopenhauer says a beautiful thing about the former,—that the “I” is the dark point in consciousness,—just as the point of the retina where the sight-nerve enters is blind, and as the brain itself is without sensation, and the eye sees all but itself. I am not anxious to see my soul; but the fact of inability to see it encourages me to believe it is better than the thing called L. H.
I don’t know that I wrote anything clever enough to be worth your using, but it is a pleasure you should think so. I can only suggest that the adoption of my poor notions would tend to make me selfish about such as I might think really good ones—I would keep them out of my letters, until they could get into print!?!
Sub rosa, now!... My Martinique novelette comes out—the first part—in January. I think you will like it better than “Chita:” it is more mature and more exotic by far. It will run through two numbers. They have made some illustrations which I have not seen, and am therefore afraid of. Unless an illustration either reflects precisely or surpasses the writer’s imagination, it hurts rather than helps. By the way, have you ever met H.F. Farny? Farny is an Alsatian, a fine man, and a superb sketcher—though lazy as a serpent. But if you ever want imaginative drawing of a certain class, he is one to do it.
Please don’t ask me when I’m going to New York. I really can’t find out. I wish I could. I ought to be there on the 15th. But I am peculiarly situated, tied up by a business-muddle,—tangled by necessities of waiting for information,—tormented, befuddled, anxious beyond expression about an undecided plan,—shivering with cold, and longing for the tropics. All my life I have suffered with cold—all kinds of cold—psychical and physical;—I hate cold!!!!—I never can resign myself to live in it!—I can’t even think in it, and I would not be afraid of that Warm Place where sinners are supposed to go! Perhaps the G.A. will sentence me to everlasting sojourn in an iceberg when I have ceased to sin.
Very faithfully, and to some extent apologetically.
For you I do remain always as nice as I can be.
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
Dear Miss Bisland,—I can’t say definitely when I shall be in New York, to have the delightful pleasure of a chat with you—something I have been looking forward to for fully a year; but I will write to tell you a few days in advance. I am drifting about with the forces of circumstance—following directions of least resistance. Just now I have a large mass (at least it looks very big to me) of MS. to amend and emend and arrange into a tropical book: you will like some things in it. When this job is finished, in a couple of weeks, it is probable I will set to work on a short sketch or story, for which I have the material partly arranged; and then I will go to New York. It is so quiet in this beautiful great city, and my present environment is so pleasant, that I am sure of doing better work here than I could in that frightful cyclone of electricity and machinery called New York....
I am afraid you were right about the tropics, and the fascination of climate. It is still upon me, and I shall find it very difficult to conquer the temptation to return to the French colonies: the main fact which helps me is the conviction that I cannot work there,—one’s memory and will blurs and fails in the incessant heat and sleepy air; and for three months before leaving I could not write a line.... My friends advise me to try the Orient next time; and I think I shall.
I have a novelette in the Magazine pigeon-holes,—you will like it; but I don’t know when it is going to come out.
It is not a little pleasure to know that my admiration of your verses can be an encouragement;—you have quite forgiven my ancient effort to amend a stanza by spoiling it!... I think your present position will leave you time—after a while—for all you love to do, and can do so uniquely. Magazine editing is so largely a question of method and system—so far as I can learn—that I fancy you will eventually find it possible to claim a few hours every day for yourself;—and such systematic work as you must take hold of, will not, like journalistic routine, deaden aspiration. I hope you will have a greater success with the new monthly than you yourself expect, and I am sure you will if you have fair chances at all.—But I must wait for the opportunity to see you—because what one writes (at least what I myself write) on such matters sounds so fictitious and flat,—though you know it comes from your sincere friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
Dear Miss Bisland,—It is true that I am only a small Voice;—but the Voice has been uninterruptedly in the City of Doctors and Quakers, with the exception of a much regretted interim passed in looking at that monstrosity,—aptly described by C. D. Warner as “having been cut out with a scroll-saw,”—Atlantic City.... (May I never, never behold anything resembling it again!) I fear you must have written the address wrong—so I send you the right one. It will always do: no matter where I be. The Voice will call at 475 Fourth Avenue as soon as it can. It is not its fault that it has not so done already. Everything to be written must be finished, if possible, by the 15th prox.,—so that I can get some place where the air is blue before cold weather. I will not be able to run away from the country before Christmas anyhow.
I trust you are very, very well,—and as—everything—nice as anybody could wish, and with best regards, remain always,
Your very true and positive friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P.S. Now I want to see those letters which came back from the Dead Letter Office. Is it really so?
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
Dear Miss Bisland,—I know I am a horrid ignis fatuus; but the proofs of “Chita” are only half-read, and I have no time to get away till it is all done. Then I am working on a sketch,—then there will be more proof-reading to do on the other book. But I will certainly get away in a few weeks more, and will have ever so many things to tell you.
I have never seen the Cosmopolitan in its new dress, and I do not know what has been going on anywhere....
Philadelphia is a city very peculiar—isolated by custom antique, but having a good solid social morality, and much peace. It has its own dry drab newspapers, which are not like any other newspapers in the world, and contain nothing not immediately concerning Philadelphia. Consequently no echo from New York enters here—nor any from anywhere else: there are no New York papers sold to speak of. The Quaker City does not want them—thinks them in bad taste, accepts only the magazines and weeklies. But it’s the best old city in the whole world all the same.
Faithfully,
L. Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
My dear Miss Bisland,—I don’t know whether you saw a little gem of Loti’s in the Fortnightly; I cut it out and send it,—also an attempt at translation which proves the wisdom of the English magazine editor in printing it in French,—and a comment of mine. I don’t think you are likely to wish to print such a thing as the translation; but if you should, don’t use it without sending me a proof, because it is full of errors.
While in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, I found it—originally contributed, in French, to the Fortnightly for August, 1888—copied into a French paper. The impression made by reading it startled me for reasons independent of the exquisite weirdness of the thought. There was the great orange sunset of the tropics before me, over a lilac sea,—bronzing the green of the mango, and tamarind-trees, and the broad, satiny leaves of bananier and balisier. The interior described in the vision was not of modern Saint-Pierre; but I knew an old interior in Fort de France, whose present quaint condition repeated precisely the background of the dream. A hundred years ago there were but two places on the sunset-side of Martinique which could have presented the spectacle of the little low streets described,—Fort de France and Saint-Pierre. The high mountains cut off the sunset glow at an early hour on the eastern side of the island. It seemed to me a strange coincidence that in Les Colonies, a local paper, I had just read also, that some old cemetery of Fort de France was about to be turned into a playground for children.
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
Dear Miss Bisland,—Verily shirîn, shirîntar, and shirîntarin art thou,—and Saadi in the Garden of the Taj likewise,—and also the letter which I have just received.
Emotionally the book is surely Arnold’s strongest: it has that intensity of sweetness which touches the sphere of pain. One need not seek in the Bostan or Gulistan for the essence of that volume: the Oriental thought has been transfigured in its reflection from a nineteenth century mind. There has been in one of Edwin Arnold’s books some suggestion of a future religion of human goodness and human brotherhood, through recognition of soul-unity,—but in none, I think, so strangely as in this. And then, what horror to read the very coarse interview published recently in a daily paper: the brutal repetition of a man’s words uttered under constraint, about the most sacred of sentiments!...
No; I won’t go to New York till you come back. I trust you will not overwork yourself: when we see (I mean “hear”) each other, we can talk over all known devices for lightening literary duties. I am acquainted with some; and I would not have you fall sick for anything—unless you were to do me something “awfully mean:” then I’m afraid I would not be so sorry as I ought to be.
I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow,—but not very long. By the way, I have an idea which may be wrong, but seems to me worth uttering. The prose fiction which lives through the centuries in the short story: like the old Greek romances—narratives like “Manon Lescaut;” “Paul et Virginie;” the “Candide” of Voltaire; the “Vicar of Wakefield;” “Undine,” etc., outlive all the ampler labour of their authors. It seems to me that with this century the great novel will pass out of fashion: three-quarters of what is written is unnecessary,—is involved simply by obedience to effete formulas and standards. As a consequence we do not read as we used to. We read only the essential, skipping all else. The book that compels perusal of every line and word is the book of power. Create a story of which no reader can skip a single paragraph, and one has the secret of force,—if not of durability. My own hope is to do something in accordance with this idea: no descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanations—nothing but the feeling itself at highest intensity. I may fail utterly; but I think I have divined a truth which will yet be recognized and pursued by stronger minds than mine. The less material, the more force;—the subtler the power the greater, as water than land, as wind than water, as mind than wind. I would like to say something about light, heat, electricity, rates of ether-vibration;—but the notion will work itself out in your own beautiful mind without any clumsy attempts of mine to illustrate. —About the translation,—do as you please,—but don’t please put it in a great big daily, next to the account of a prize-fight or a murder,—and please, if you do anything with it, see, above all things earthly, that I get proofs. But I would just as soon you would keep it. I made it for you, and am glad you had not seen the original previously. I thought the Cosmo. was a sort of literary weekly. It is a beautiful little magazine,—full of surprises; and I trust it is going to win a great success.
Good-bye;—your Voice wishes you a very happy pleasure-trip, in which you will feel all sorts of new feelings, and dream all manner of new dreams.
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
Philadelphia, 1889.
This morning I dropped you a little note; but this afternoon, reading your book-chat in the Cosmo. I find I must write you something more impersonal.
—You know, perhaps, that Spencer’s thought about education—the paramount necessity of educating the Will through the Emotion—has received, consciously or unconsciously, more attention in Italy than elsewhere. The Emotions are not, as a rule, educated at all outside of the home-circle. The great public schools of all countries have a system which either ignores the emotions, or leaves them unprotected;—while all sectarian teaching warps and withers them in the direction, at least, of their natural growth. You know all this, I suppose, better than I. But perhaps you do not know the “Cuore” of Edmondo de Amicis (Thos. Y. Crowell & Co.), which has passed through 39 Italian editions. And if you do not know it, I pray you to read it without skipping a single phrase. It is as full of heart-sweetness as attar-of-roses is full of flower-ghosts; and it seems a revelation of what emotional education might accomplish.
I read Brownell’s book at your suggestion. It contains, I think, the best teaching about how to study French character; but I could not accept many of its inferences,—especially in regard to art and morality,—without reluctance. There is a sense of something wanting in the book—something lucid and spiritual (is it Conviction?) that makes it heavy. How luminous and psychically electric is Lowell’s book compared with it. And how much nobler a soul must be the dreamer of Chosön!
—I shall never write “Miss Bisland” again, except upon an envelope. It is a formality,—and you are you: you are not a formality,—but a somewhat. And I am only
“I.”
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
Dear Gould,—Verily there is no strength nor power but from God,—the High, the Great! I have thy letter, O thou of enormous working capacity, and I admire and wonder, but am in no wise sorry for thee, seeing thou doest that which thou art able to do, and findest pleasure therein and excellence and dignity and power,—and that if thou wert doing it not thou wouldst surely be doing something else;—for God (whose name be exalted!) hath numbered thee among those who find felicity in exceeding activity. Thou art indeed forty-one years old, by reckoning of time; but as thou art of the Giants this reckoning hath no signification for thee. Verily thou art but twenty-five years old, and thou shalt never know age until a hundred winters shall have passed over thee. And all things which thou dost desire shall be accorded unto thee by Him who, like thyself, reposeth never, and whose blessed name be forever exalted! Also unto thee shall the patients come, as an army for multitude, so that thy bell shall make but one ringing through all thy days continuously, and that thy neighbours shall be oppressed by reason of the concourse in the street about thy dwelling.
But as for me, concerning whom thou makest inquiry, trouble not thyself about thy servant, whose trust and power are in God—the High, the Great! That which shall be shall be, and that which hath been shall not be again:—for the moment, indeed, I am concerned only to know why the flame of my lamp goeth upward, and all flame likewise,—unless it be for the purpose of praising God (whose name be exalted by all living creatures!). For thou saidst unto me, being a Kafeer, that Flame is a vibration only; but thou hast not been able to tell me the mystery of the pointing of fire and the upreaching of it to the feet of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
Here it raineth always, and this Soul of me is slowly evaporating, despite the perusal of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who spake of souls. Meseems that each time I behold the eyes of her concerning whom I spake to thee, something of that soul is drawn out unto her, and devoured perhaps for sustenance of that Jinneyah—which is her own soul. So that mine hath become thin as the inner shadow wrought by a strong double light upon the ground; and I shall become even as a vegetable presently—having knowledge of nothing save the witchery of God in the eyes of women. The memory of Schopenhauer hath passed,—and with its passing I find my only salvation in a return to the study of the Oceanic Majesty and Power and Greatness and Holiness and Omniscience of the mind of Herbert Spencer.
Be thou ever blessed and loved by the sons of men, even as by
Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
Gould,—You must have skipped, bad boy!—for the girl is not “all face and foot”! You missed the finely detailed account of her body in William’s diary,—and the just observation of a trait characteristic of the race in its purity; the great length of the lower limb,—fine greyhounds, fine thoroughbred horses, and fine men and women have all this characteristic, like the conventional figures of antique gem-work. The gipsy-girl is possible: I have seen charming ones. You must read Borrow’s “Gipsies” (the unabbreviated edition in two volumes),—also his "Bible in Spain,” and “Lavengro,”—a Gipsy novel. Simpson’s “Gipsies” is also worth looking at.... But if you won’t believe in the bird of passage, take Carmen and believe in her—there, at least, you will not doubt: all will prove in accordance with possible sin and sorrow. Why do you want the Bird’s body to be better known—since nobody ever knew it any better than you know it; (or would know if you had read all)—could not have except by making to operate, like the Vicar of Azey-le-Rideau, all its “hinges and mesial partitions,” even to disjuncture. What a singular fact in the history of torture, that the inquisitor was trained to believe the beautiful body he was breaking and rending and burning was never beautiful—that its grace and symmetry were illusions, the witchcraft of the dear old compassionate Devil striving to save his victim by the mirage of fleshly attractiveness! Only through this belief could certain monstrosities have been possible. It was always Saint Anthony’s temptation!
I have a book for you—an astounding book,—a godlike book. But I want you to promise to read every single word of it. Every word is dynamic. It is the finest book on the East ever written; and though very small contains more than all my library of Oriental books. And an American (?) wrote it! It is called “The Soul of the Far East.” It will astound you like Schopenhauer, the same profundity and lucidity. Love to you,
Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
Dear Gould,—I blacked—that is, I had my boots blacked yesterday,—just for the same reason that we do things after people are dead (which we would not have done for them while they lived and asked), with a ghostly idea of pleasing them. If you had been here I might not have had them blacked, but as you were gone, I did it for the Shadow of you. And I gave the boy 20 cents,—because of the feeling that he might never have such a chance again. That boy runs after me now everywhere,—but—he is mistaken! I am no longer the same! I have satisfied my conscience, and enjoy Nirvana.
This morning when I got up I thought the streets looked queer. It seemed as if they were lighted by the afternoon in some way or other, instead of the morning. I went to the P. O. with “The Soul of the Far East.” How silent the streets for a Friday morning! The population seemed all to have ebbed away somewhere as if to look at something. The post-office was silent as a pyramid inside. I went to the book-store, and found it closed,—and for the first time realized that it was Sunday. Then I understood why the streets looked like afternoon; and the sunshine had a tinge as of evening in a cemetery. Confound Sunday!
Talking with Jakey last night about Nature, I heard him express the opinion that his capacity of scientific realization of the causes of things was enough to account for the absence in him of any feeling of awe or reverence in the presence of mountain scenery. It occurred to me therewith that the characteristic of indifference to poetry might be almost common to mathematicians. The man who wrote “The Soul of the Far East” and “Chosön” is nevertheless an accomplished mathematician. But you will notice that his divine poetry touches only that which no scientific knowledge can explain,—that which no mathematics can solve,—that which must remain mysterious throughout all conceivable span of time,—the fluttering of the Human Soul in its chrysalis, which it at once hates and loves, and hates because it loves, and strives to burst through, and still fears unspeakably to break,—though dimly conscious of the infinite Ghostly Peace beyond.
Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
Dear Gould,—I feel like a white granular mass of amorphous crystals—my formula appears to be isomeric with Spasmotoxin. My aurochloride precipitates into beautiful prismatic needles. My Platinochloride develops octohedron crystals,—with a fine blue fluorescence. My physiological action is not indifferent. One millionth of a grain injected under the skin of a frog produced instantaneous death accompanied by an orange blossom odour. The heart stopped in systole. A base—L3 H9 NG4—offers analogous reaction to phosmotinigstic acid. Yours with best regards,
Phosmolyodic Lafcadio Hearn.
Gould,—“Concerning zombis, tell me all about them.”
Hearn,—“In order to relate you that which you desire, it will be necessary first to explain the difference in the idea of the supernatural as existing in the savage and in the civilized mind. Now, I remember a very strange thing....”
Gould,—“I’ll be back in a minute.” (Strides across the street.)
Violent agitation in the peripheral centres of Hearn, together with considerable acute anguish, owing to disintegration of cerebral tissue consequent upon the sudden arrest of nerve-force in discharge. (See Grant Allen on cause of pain, “Physiological Æsthetics.”)
Gould, suddenly reappearing:—“Go on with that old story, now.”
(Resurrection of cerebral agitation in the ganglionic centres and intercorrelate cerebral fibres of Hearn. After desperate and painful research, the broken threads of memories and impulses are found again, and peripherally conjointed, and the wounded narrative proceeds, limping grievously.)
Hearn,—“As I was observing, I recollect one very curious instance of emotional and fantastic—”
Gould,—“Yes, I’ll be out in a moment—“ (Disappears through a door.)
—Brutal confusion established in the visual, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory ganglia of Hearn;—general quivering and strain of all the mnemonic current lines, and then a sense of inquisitorial torture going on in various brain-chambers, where the vital forces, suddenly arrested, flow back in a deluge and set all ideas afloat in drowning agony. Slow recovery as from concussion of the cerebellum.
Enter Gould,—“Now proceed with that story of yours.”
Hearn,—pacifying the fury of the ganglionic centres with the most extreme possible difficulty, timidly observes,—
“But you don’t care to hear it?”
Gould,—moving with inconceivable rapidity, dynamically overcharged,—
“Of course, I do: I’m just dying to hear it.”
Hearn, running after him, skipping preliminaries in the anguish of “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick,”—
“Well, it was in the Rue du Bois Morier,—one of the steepest and strangest streets in the world, full of fantastic gables, and the shadows of—”
Gould,—“Yes, I’ll be out in a minute.” (Vanishes through a shop entrance.)
(Inexpressible chaos and bewilderment of impulses afferent and efferent,—electrical collisions in the ganglia,—unspeakable combustion of tissue in the intercorrelating fibres,—paralysis of conflicting emotions,—unutterable anguish: coma followed by acute mania in the person of Hearn.)
Gould,—emerging, “Well, go on with that old yarn....”
But Hearn is being already conveyed by two large Philadelphia Policemen to the Penn. Lunatic Asylum for Uncurables.
Astonishment of Gould.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
Gould,—Just after I wrote you last night, something began to whiffle quite soundlessly round my head: I saw only a shadow, and I turned down the gas,—remembering that he who extinguisheth his light so that insects may not perish therein, shall, according to the book of Laotse, obtain longer life and remission of sins. Then it struck me with its wings so heavily that I knew it was a bat,—for no bird could fly so silently; and I turned up the gas again,—full. There it was!—very large,—circling round and round the ceiling so swiftly that I felt dizzy trying to turn to keep it in sight,—and as noiselessly as its own shadow above it. I could not tell which was the shadow and which the life,—until both came together at last upon a ledge, and made a little peak-shouldered devilish thing with strangely twisted ears.
All at once I remembered an experience in Martinique one summer evening. We were at Grand Anse,—friend Arnoux and I,—supping in a little room opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of the sea; and the great Voice thundered so we could scarcely hear ourselves speak; and the candle in the verrine fluttered like something afraid. Then right over my head a bat began to circle, with never a sound. Arnoux exclaimed: “Mais, mon cher, regarde cette sacrée bête—ah—c’est drôle!” By the look of his face I knew drôle meant “weird.” He struck it down with his napkin and it disappeared; but a moment later came back again, and flew round as before. Again he hit it and drove it away; but it always came flitting back. Then we all laughed;—and Pierre, the host, tickling my ear with his beard, cried out,—“C’est ta maîtresse à Saint-Pierre—elle est morte,—elle vient te chercher.” And I looked so serious that Arnoux burst into a laugh as loud as the surf outside.
Now when I saw that bat, I thought it was “weird,”—drôle as the other. I even found myself wondering, Who it could be? I thought it might be Clemence, about whose death I received news in my last letter. I did not think for a moment it was Gould. Only some very poor simple soul would avail itself of so humble a vehicle for apparition.... Then it looked so much like something damned as it moved about, that I felt ashamed of thinking it could be Clemence,—the best kind of old souls, Clemence!—My blanchisseuse. It was not easy to catch the bat without hurting it. I argued that if it was anybody I knew it could not be afraid of me. It sat on the mirror. It went under the table. It flattened under the trunk and feigned death. Then I caught it in my hat; and it revealed its plain nature by burying its teeth in my finger; and it would not let go,—and it squeaked and chippered like a ghost. I was almost mad enough to hurt it; but I tried to caress its head, which felt soft and nice. But it showed all its teeth and looked too ugly, and there was a musky smell of hell about it—so that I knew, if it were anybody, the place with a capital “P” where it came from. I put it in a box. To-night I am going to let it go.
With love to you,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
My most dear Gould,—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 Gould at 119 S. 17th St. That I should cease to make a shadow some day seems quite natural, because Hearn 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-purifying sun,—and reach down through old roots to the bones of me, and try to raise me up.
“Ruth" maketh progress; but I had to murder the “Mother of God.” Anyhow the simile would have had a Catholic idolatrousness about it, so that I don’t regret it.—I send a clipping I found in the trunk, to make you laugh: the “Femmes Arabes” of Dr. Perron furnished me the facts.—Mrs. Gould moveth or reposeth in serenity,—Jakey fulfilleth with becoming dignity the duties devolved upon him. I have consumed one plug of “Quaker City;” but as the smoke spires up, the spiritual-sensualism of “Ruth” becometh manifest.
There has been some rain almost worthy of the tropics,—and much darkness. And I can understand better why the ancients of Yucatan, accustomed to the charm of real physical light (about which you Northerners know nothing), put no fire into their hell, but darkness only, as woe enough for tropical souls to bear!
I hope you are having a glorious, joyous journeying, and remain,
Lovingly yours,
Hearn.
TO ——
1889.
I am very sorry your trip was a chilly and rainy one. As for me, I have been shivering here, and have got to get South somewhere soon,—if only till I can get back to the tropics. I am sorry to confess it; but the tropical Circe bewitches me again—I must go back to her.
I had such a queer dream last night. A great, warm garden with high clipped hedges,—much higher than a man,—and a sort of pleasant country-house, with steps leading into the garden,—and everywhere, even on the steps, hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there,—he told me he was going to Europe never to come back. And you were there, too, all in black silk—sheathed in it; you were also going away somewhere; and I was packing for you, getting things ready. Everybody was saying nice things: one did not seem to hear,—really one never hears voices in dreams,—but one feels the words, tones and all, as if they passed unspoken—just the soul or will of them only—out of one brain into another. I can’t remember what anybody said precisely: what I recollect best is the sensation that everybody was going, and that I was to stay all alone in the place, or anywhere I pleased; and it was getting dark. Then I woke up, and said: “Well, I really must see her.” I suppose dreams mean nothing: but interpreted by the contrary, as is a custom, it would mean the reverse—that I am going away somewhere,—which I don’t yet know
Always and in all things yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
P. S. Oh!—you spoke about Philadelphia.... Is it possible you have never seen it? Is it possible you have never seen Fairmount Park? Believe me, then, that it is the most beautiful place of the whole civilized world on any sunny, tepid summer day. Your Central Park is a cabbage-garden by comparison: F. Pk. is fifteen miles long, by about eight or ten broad. But the size is nothing. It is the beauty of the woods and their vistas, the long drives by the river, the glimpse of statuary and fountains from delightful terraces, the knolls commanding the whole circle of the horizon, the vast garden and lawn spaces, the shadowed alleys where 100,000 people make scarcely any more sound than a swarm of bees,—and over it all such a soft, sweet dreamy light. (When you go to see it, be sure to choose a sunny, warm day.) Thousands of thousands of carriages file by, each with a pair of lovers in it. Everybody in the park seems to be making love to somebody. Love is so much the atmosphere of the place,—a part of the light and calm and perfume—that you feel as if drenched with it, permeated by it, mesmerized. And if you are all alone, you will look about you once in a while, wondering that somebody else is not beside you.... But I forgot that I am not writing to a stupid man, like myself.
L. H.
TO ——
New York, November, 1889.
Oh! you splendid girl!—will it really give you some short pleasure to see this old humbug’s writing again?... I was very sorry not to have been able to see you: I should have wished to be able to give you a few bits of advice about precautions to take during the tropical part of your trip. But I have faith in your superb constitution and youth,—and trust this will reach eyes undimmed by fever, and brightened more than ever by the glow of all the strange suns that will have shone upon you.
So that is my dream that I wrote you about: it was you, not I, that were to run away. But I did not help you to do your packing, as I imagined.
I wonder if you went away in black silk, or black cashmere: I dreamed of you all in black that time. And when I saw the charming notice about you in the Tribune, there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,—an absurd sense of absolute loneliness.
For seldom as I saw you, I must tell you that I looked forward to such visits as to something very delightful, that helped me to forget the great iron-whirling world and everything in it but yourself. You made a little circle of magnetic sunshine for me; and you know I liked to bask in it so much that I used to be quite selfish about it. I feel now as though, each night I sat up so late in your little parlour, I was taking from you so much rest,—which means life and strength,—acted, in short, the part of a psychical cannibal! And I am remorseful at not being able to feel more remorseful than I do; it was so nice to be there that I can’t be properly sorry, as I should.
I and my friends have been wagering upon you, hoping for you, praying for you to win your race,—so that every one may admire you still more, and your name be flashed round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your portrait—in spite of you—appear in some French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you never are the same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled: it could only be one small phase of you,—Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!
—And you found the loose bar at last, and shook it out, and flew! I much doubt if they will ever get you well into the cage again,—that was so irksome to you. But perhaps the world itself will seem a cage to you hereafter:—it will have grown so much smaller in that blue-flashing circuit of yours about it. Perhaps when human society shall have become infinitely more fluid and electric than at present,—which it is sure to do with the expansion and increasing complexity of intercommunication by steam and wire,—this little half-dead planet will seem too small to mankind. One will feel upon it, in the light of a larger knowledge, constrained almost as much as Simon on the top of his pillar,—and long, like him, for birth into a larger mode of being. Even now there is no more fleeing into strange countries,—because there are no strange countries: everything is being interbound and interspersed with steel rails and lightning wires;—there are no more mysteries,—except what are called hearts, those points at which individualities rarely touch each other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out of soul-sight.
—Did you often wish to stop somewhere, and feel hearts beating about you, and see the faces of gods and dancing-girls? Or were you petted like the Lady of the Aroostook by officers and crew,—and British dignitaries eager to win one Circe-smile,—and superb Indian Colonels of princely houses returning home,—that you had no chance to regret anything? I have been so afraid of never seeing you again, that I have been hating splendid imaginary foreigners in dreams,—which would have been quite wickedly selfish if I had been awake!...
With every true good wish and sincere affection,
Your friend,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ——
March 7–8, 1890
I must write you a line or two, before I finish packing,—though it is the hour of ghosts, when writing is a grave imprudence. Something makes me write you nevertheless.
I could not go to see Mr. M——: there was too much ice and snow. But you can forgive that.
I shall be very sorry not to see you again,—and this time, you are not sorry to know I am going away as you were when I went South. Perhaps you are quite right....
—But that is nothing. What I want to say is, that after looking at your portrait, I must tell you how sweet and infinitely good you ... can be, and how much I like you, and how I like you,—or at least some of those many who are one in you.
I might say love you,—as we love those who are dead—(the dead who still shape lives);—but which, or how many, of you I cannot say. One looks at me from your picture; but I have seen others, equally pleasing and less mysterious.
... Not when you were in evening dress, because you were then too beautiful; and what is thus beautiful is not that which is most charming in you. It only dazzles one, and constrains.... I like you best in the simple dark dress, when I can forget everything except all the souls of you. Turn by turn one or other floats up from the depth within and rushes to your face and transfigures it;—and that one which made you smile with pleasure like a child at something pretty we were both admiring is simply divine.... I do not think you really know how sacred you are; and yet you ought to know: it is because you do not know what is in you, who are in you, that you say such strangely material things. And you yourself, by being, utterly contradict them all.
It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you—all the Me’s that were—keep asking the Me that is, for something always refused;—that you keep saying to them: “But you are dead and cannot see—you can only feel; and I can see,—and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait and leave me in peace with myself.” But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,—and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come—and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ... what was it?
Really, I can’t remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of it,—just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly exposed. There was such a child-beauty in that smile.... Will you ever be like that always for any one being?
—I hope you will get my book before you go: it will be sent you Tuesday at latest, I think. I don’t know whether you will like the paper; but you will only look for the “gnat of a soul” that belongs to me between the leaves.
—Forgive all my horrid ways, my dear, sweet, ghostly sister.
Good-bye,
Lafcadio Hearn.
END OF VOLUME I
The following version of the story is reproduced from a letter written by Mrs. Hearn in reply to a request for any knowledge she might have gained on this subject from her husband’s conversations with her during their life together in Japan. Its poignant simplicity is heightened by the transmutations through two languages.
“Mama San--When about four years old I did very rude things. Mama gave me a struck on my cheek with her palm. It was very strong. I got angry and gazed on my Mama’s face, which I never forget. Thus I remember my Mama’s face. She was of a little stature, with black hair and black eyes, like a Japanese woman. How pitiable Mama San she was. Unhappy Mama San; pitiable indeed! Think of that--Think: you are my wife, and I take you with Kazuo and Iwao to my native country: you do not know the language spoken there, nor have any friend. You have your husband only, who prove not very kind. You must be so very unhappy then. And then if I happened to love some native lady and say ‘Sayonara’ to you, how you would trouble your heart! That was the case with my Mama. I have not such cruel heart. But only to think of such thing makes me sad. To see your face troubled just now my heart aches. Let us drop such subject from our talk.”
“Papa San--It is only once that I remember I felt glad with my papa. Yes, on that occasion! Perhaps I was then a boy like Iwao or Kiyoshi. I was playing with my nurse. Many a sound of ‘gallop-trop’ came from behind. The nurse laughed and lifted me high up. I observed my papa pass; I called him with my tiny hand--now such a big hand. Papa took me from the hands of nurse. I was on horseback. As I looked behind a great number of soldiers followed on horseback with ‘gallop-trop.’ I imagined myself that I was a general then. It was only on that time that I thought how good papa he was.”
A cousin writes of him at this period: “I remember him a boy with a great taste for drawing. Very near-sighted, but so tender and careful of me as a little child. He was at a priest’s college where I was taken by my grand-aunt (who had adopted him), to see him. I remember his taking me upstairs to look at the school-room, and on the way bidding me bow to an image of the Virgin, which I refused to do. He became very much excited and begged me to tell him the reason of my refusal. He always seemed very much in earnest, and to have a very sensitive nature.”
A fellow-pupil at Ushaw says of him:—
“My acquaintance with him began at Ushaw college, near Durham. Discovering that we had some tastes in common, we chummed a good deal, discussing our favourite authors, which in Lafcadio’s case were chiefly poets, though he also took considerable interest in books of travel and adventure. Even then his style was remarkable for graphic power, combined with graceful expression.... He was of a very speculative turn of mind, and I have a lively recollection of the shock it occasioned to several of us when he one day announced his disbelief in the Bible. I am of opinion, however, that he was then only posing as an esprit fort, for a few days afterwards, during a walk with the class in the country, he returned to this subject in discussion with a master, and I inferred from what he said to me that he was quite satisfied with the evidences of the truth of the Scriptures. It is interesting in connection with this to recall his subsequent adoption of Buddhism. I am rather inclined to think that in either 1864 or 1865 Lafcadio devoted more attention to general literature than to his school studies, as (if my memory does not play me false) he was ‘turned back’ on our class moving into ‘Grammar.’...
“Longfellow was one of his favourite poets, his beautiful imagery and felicity of expression appealing with peculiar force to a kindred soul. He was fond of repeating scraps of poetry descriptive of heroic combats, feats of arms, or of the prowess of the Baresarks, or Berserkers, as described in Norse sagas.... He used to dwell with peculiar satisfaction on the line:—
‘Like Thor’s hammer, huge and dinted, was his horny hand.’
Lafcadio was proud of his biceps, and on repeating this line he would bend his right arm and grasp the muscle with his left hand. I often addressed him as ‘The Man of Gigantic Muscle.’ After he went to America I had little communication with him beyond, I think, one letter. We then drifted different ways. He was a very lovable character, extremely sympathetic and sincere.”
Bush clover.
“Hotoke-sama” means the dead.
Hearn rarely dated his letters, but in most cases internal evidence makes possible the assignment of a fairly definite date.
See page [205].
Transcriber’s Note
The following list contains questionable spellings (and the page upon which they appeared) which have been retained:
befel (116); Buddist (142); begining (146); bazar (149, 342)
There are also some constructions that seem questionable:
| p. 138 | unimportant detail and [banal ana] | banaliana? |
| p. 152 | he was so enthusiastic[ally] that | sic |
| p. 183 | spectre is the ?—“Where shall I go? | ‘?’ stands for ‘question’. |
| p. 329 | Very truly your friend[./,] | Corrected. |
| p. 387 | the simple hook-mark “?”[.] I can imagine | A full stop is needed. |
| p. 410 | wildest dreams[,/.] The artistic | Corrected. |