II
The opposite of Warner in every respect was Lafcadio Hearn, a figure more picturesque even than Joaquin Miller and more puzzling than Whitman. Instead of serene classicism, genius; instead of Puritan inflexibility and reverence for the respectable, tumultuous wanderings—a man without a country, without a religion, without anything fixed save a restless love of the beautiful—emotional, a bundle of nerves, moody, sudden, the gorgeous Gallic at eternal odds with the florid, beauty-loving Hellenic; a man forever homeless, yet forever pathetic with a nostalgia that finally broke his heart. His personality was a strangely elusive one, and his biography, especially in its earlier years, is as full of romantic conjecture as De Quincey's early life or Byron's. His very name was romantic. His father, member of an ancient Irish family, had accompanied his regiment as surgeon-major into the East, and while stationed at Corfu had become infatuated with a beautiful Grecian girl, Rosa Cerigote, and had married her. Lafcadio they named their son from the island where he was born, his mother's home, Leucadia, in modern Greek Lefcadia, the Ionian island of Sappho. Here he spent his babyhood, how much of it we do not know. Of his father, he has said nothing, and of his mother, only this hint in a later bit of impressionism—elusive, suggestive, characteristic:
I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before, I can not tell, but I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world—almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into the equatorial summer.... Each day there were new wonders and new pleasures for me, and all that country and time were softly ruled by one who thought only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done and there fell the great hush of the light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.
Was it the Ægean island of his birth or was it the West Indian island to which his father later was ordered with his regiment? We do not know. We know, however, that the mother lived for a time in Ireland, that another son was born, and then when the elder boy was seven she went away to Smyrna never to return. The rest is conjecture, save for the significant fact that both parents soon afterward married again.
The boy, unwelcome, forlorn, out of sympathy with his surroundings, was sent to live with his aunt in Ireland, then later was put to school in France in preparation for the priesthood. Two years in France, formative years in which he learned among a myriad of other things the fluent use of French, then in 1865 we find him in the Roman Catholic college at Durham, England, where came to him the first great tragedy of his life: an accident at play that left him blinded in one eye and partly blinded in the other. Soon afterwards came the break with his aunt—father and mother had passed out of his life—he refused to become a priest, refused to live longer in any paths save his own, and for the rest of his life he was a wanderer.
There is much in his life and temperament to suggest De Quincey. Hearn, too, for a vague period—two or three years it may have been—wandered in the lower strata of London, half dead with hunger and sickness, aflame with imagination, restless, ambitious. At nineteen we find him in New York, reading in the public library, eagerly, omnivorously, despite his feeble vision, then suddenly, how we do not know, he is in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he makes the whole city gasp with horror at the story he writes of a murder in one of their narrow streets, and secures a position on the Enquirer. In 1877 he has wandered as far south as New Orleans, where for the first time in his life he finds congenial atmosphere and where he supports himself by reporting for the Times-Democrat.
Now it was that his French schooling had its effect. The Creole patois delighted him; he compiled a book of Creole proverbs, Gombo Zhêbes he fantastically called it; and he fed his imagination with the old French past of the city, wandering as Cable had done among its ancient buildings, and, like Cable again, devouring its romantic old chronicles. French novels he read interminably, eagerly, especially the romantics—Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire. How richly he read them we learn from his letters, most of all from those written in his later life to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain and preserved in Elizabeth Bisland's third volume. Few have read more discerningly or have voiced their findings more brilliantly. This of Loti:
There is not much heart in Loti, but there is a fine brain.—To me Loti seems for a space to have looked into Nature's whole splendid burning fulgurant soul, and to have written under her very deepest and strongest inspiration. He was young. Then the color and the light faded, and only the worn-out blasé nerves remained; and the poet became—a little morbid modern affected Frenchman.
Strange self-revealment. It was of himself he was speaking, had he but realized it. He too began with power under the deepest and strongest inspiration; he too had caught a vision, splendid, burning, fulgurant. If there was an undoubted genius in our national period it was Hearn. He poured his eager dreamings at first into the New Orleans papers: "Fantastics," they have been called, by the editor who of late has hunted them from their forgotten columns. Then came Chita, written after a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico and published first in the Times-Democrat with the title Torn Letters, and then in Harper's Magazine, April, 1888.
Here for the first time we get the measure of the man, his Celtic imagination, fervor and intensity, his Greek passion for beauty. It is not English at all: it is the dream of a Celtic Greek, who has saturated himself with the French romantics and the color and the profusion of the tropic gulf lands. It is not, as the magazine termed it, a novelette; it is a loosely gathered bundle of fictional sketches, lurid patches, "torn letters," indeed, written with torrential power and blazing with color. Everywhere landscapes intense, drawn with fewest strokes, impressions, suggestions. He would make you feel the desolate shore on the gulf side of the island, but he selects only a single detail:
The trees—where there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and even of bright hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed—for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry.
Always is he a colorist, and always does he use his colors daintily, effectively, distinctively—one feels rather than sees:
The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles—a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring.
It describes his own style; one need say no more.
When he would describe action there is in him a Byronic power that lays hold on one and chokes and stifles. Who outside of Don Juan has made us feel so fearfully a tropic hurricane?
Then arose a frightful cry—the hoarse, hideous, indescribable cry of hopeless fear—the despairing animal-cry man utters when suddenly brought face to face with Nothingness, without preparation, without consolation, without possibility of respite. Sauve qui peut! Some wrenched down the doors; some clung to the heavy banquet tables, to the sofas, to the billiard tables—during one terrible instant—against fruitless heroisms, against futile generosities—raged all the frenzy of selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then—then came, thundering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom on boom!—One crash!—the huge frame building rocks like a cradle, seesaws, crackles. What are human shrieks now?—the tornado is shrieking! Another!—chandeliers splinter; lights are dashed out; a sweeping cataract hurls in: the immense hall rises—oscillates—twirls as upon a pivot—crepitates—crumbles into ruin. Crash again!—the swirling wreck dissolves into the wallowing of another monster billow; and a hundred cottages overturn, spin on sudden eddies, quiver, disjoint, and melt into the seething.
So the Hurricane passed.
Chita, like all the rest of Hearn's work, is a thing of fragments. It leaps and bounds, it chokes with tropic heat, it blazes with the sunsets of the Mexican gulf, it stagnates with torrid siestas, it is raucous with the voices of tropic insects and birds. It is incoherent, rhapsodic, half picture, half suggestion—materials rather than final structure. The style is wholly Gallic, like Cable's early style—sudden breaks—dashes—sentences stripped to the bare nouns and adjectives, swift shiftings of scenes, interjected exclamations, prayers:
Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken all mythology dumb—thou most wrinkled living Sea, etc.
Then swiftly following:
Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;—midsummer in the pest-smitten city of New Orleans.
Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;—the lukewarm river yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. The nights began with a black heat;—there were hours when the acrid air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the bronchial tubing;—then, toward morning it would grow chill with venomous vapors, with morbific dews—till the sun came up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-heat. And the interminable procession of mourners and hearses and carriages again began to circulate between the centers of life and death;—and long trains of steamships rushed from the port with heavy burden of fugitives.
Then terror that lays cold hands on the heart: Julian dying of fever.
From New Orleans he went in 1887 to the Windward Islands for new sensation, new color, new barbaric areas of human life. Two Years in the French West Indies is the literary result of it, a chaotic book, flashlights, impressions, but no single completed impression, no totality, but the soul of the West Indies none the less, revealed with a rare, queer art that was individual. But no place, not even those Circe islands which he paints as the dream and the ultimate of human desire, could detain him long. Fickleness was in his blood, wandering was his birthright. Again he is in New York, and then with a commission from the Harpers he sails to Japan, where, in the rush and tumult of new sensation, he forgets his commission and loses himself completely in the new delicious world of impression.
For Hearn was as unpractical as Shelley and he was without Shelley's ideals and altruistic dreams. He lived in a vague world of vision, of sensation, of intangible beauty. He could say of himself:
Always having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical matters that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden. Nothing about what a man ought to do under any possible circumstances. I know nothing but sensation and books.
Though he was now forty, he entered this new world as one new born into it. He adopted its costume, he slept with his head on a wooden pillow, he acquired citizenship, he married a Japanese wife and established a Japanese home, and he even went over completely to the Buddhist religion.
The book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894, marks the beginning of his second literary period. Henceforth his writings center about Japan. He wrote no treatise, no serious study of actual conditions; he wrote impressions, fragmentary suggestions of the Japan that was passing away, the romantic Japan of the ideal old régime, survivals of which he found everywhere. Japanese art and Japanese romance found in him a curious affinity. They mellowed and soothed the tumultuous spirit of his first art period. His impressionism became more subtly suggestive, more magically vague, more daintily colored. There had always been within him a strong element of mysticism, legacy of his Irish ancestry, and the subtly mystical side of Buddhism appealed to it strongly. He was able to interpret it for occidental comprehension, and he was able to make more comprehensible the subtle connotation of Japanese art, and to catch the subtler inner consciousness of Japan as no other of the Western world has ever caught it. In his first enthusiasm he wrote:
This is a land where one can really enjoy the Inner Life. Every one has an inner life of his own—which no other life can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, though occasionally when we create something beautiful we betray a faint glimpse of it.
But the newness of this new world he had entered wore away at length. He was a creature of enthusiastic moments and he needed swift changes of sensation. He had reveled in the old, ideal Japan, but he found himself unable to live in it. A new régime had begun. He was filled with contempt at what he called "the frank selfishness, the apathetic vanity, the shallow, vulgar skepticism of the new Japan that prates its contempt about Tempo times, and ridicules the dear old men of the premeiji era." His last years were bitter with financial embarrassment, and full of feverish literary creation for the sake of his growing family. The glow and fervor and genius of his first period faded more and more from his work;—he himself faded out. He felt the gulf that he had erected between himself and his race. To his sister he wrote: "I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me homesick for English life." He died of his own vehemence, worn out by oversensation, unnerved by restlessness and nostalgia and longing for he knew not what.
The likeness of Hearn to De Quincey is almost complete. He had De Quincey's irresoluteness, his jangling nerves, his dominating fancy, his discursiveness, his gorgeous imagination, his oriental soul hampered with the fetters of occidental science. He too was essentially fragmentary in his literary output, a man of intense moods intensely painted, a man of books but of no single, unified, compelling book. One may not read essays like "Gothic Horror" or "The Nightmare Touch," or a passage like this from "Vespertina Cognitio," and not think of the great English opium-eater:
It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first vague uneasiness—the suspicion—that precedes a nightmare. I was half-conscious, dream-conscious of the actual—knew myself in that very room—wanted to get up. Immediately the uneasiness grew into terror, because I found that I could not move. Something unutterable in the air was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort resulted only in a whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultaneously I became aware of a Step ascending the stair—a muffled heaviness; and the real nightmare began—the horror of the ghastly magnetism that held voice and limb—the hopeless will-struggle against dumbness and impotence. The stealthy Step approached—but with lentor malevolently measured—slowly, slowly, as if the stairs were miles deep. It gained the threshold—waited. Gradually then, and without sound, the locked door opened; and the Thing entered, bending as it came—a thing robed—feminine—reaching to the roof, not to be looked at! A floor-plank creaked as It neared the bed;—and then—with a frantic effort—I woke, bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it were going to burst. The shrine-light had died: in the blackness I could see nothing; but I thought I heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard the plank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of striking a match occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise. Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new wave of black fear passed through me; for I heard moanings—long nightmare moanings—moanings that seemed to be answering each other from two different rooms below. And then close to me my guide began to moan—hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him:—
"Louis!—Louis!"
We both sat up at once.
Like De Quincey, he lingers over the flavor of words, gathering them everywhere he may and gloating over them, tasting them with half-closed eyes like an epicure, and using them ever delicately, suggestively, inevitably.
For me words have color, form, character: they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humors, eccentricities;—they have tints, tones, personalities.... Surely I have never yet made, and never expect to make any money. Neither do I expect to write ever for the multitude. I write for beloved friends who can see color in words, can smell the perfume of syllables in blossom, can be shocked with the fine elfish electricity of words. And in the eternal order of things, words will eventually have their rights recognized by the people.
His essays, therefore, even as he has intimated, are for the few who are attuned to them, who have sense for delicate suggestion, for "the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisomeness of words, the tenderness, the hardness, the dryness or juiciness of words." Aside from his vision of beauty, his intensity, his suggestiveness of style, he has brought not much. The romancers of the period, a few of them, like Grace King, for example, have felt his influence, but it has not been a large one. He stands almost an isolated figure in his period, an intensely individual soul, a solitary genius like Poe. His place is a secure one. His circle of readers will never be large, but it will always be constant.