“In Cincinnati such work was much harder than now, because more and better work was demanded of a man for his weekly stipend than at present.... Had he been then on a New York daily his articles would have attracted bidding from rival managements, but in Cincinnati there was little, if any, encouragement for such brilliant powers as his. The Commercial took him on at twenty dollars a week.... Though he worked hard for a pittance he never slighted anything he had to do.... He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment.... His employers kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper—the night stations—for in that field developed the most sensational events, and he was strongest in the unusual and the startling.”
For two years more this was the routine of his daily life. He formed, in spite of his shyness, some ties of intimacy; especially with Joseph Tunison, a man of unusual classical learning, with H. F. Farny, the artist, and with the now well-known musical critic and lecturer, H. E. Krehbiel. Into these companionships he threw all the ardour of a very young man; an ardour increased beyond even the usual intensity of young friendships, by the natural warmth of his feelings and the loneliness of his life, bereft of all those ties of family common to happier fates. In their company he developed a quality of bonhomie that underlay the natural seriousness of his temperament, and is frequently visible in his letters, breaking through the gravity of his usual trend of thought. Absence and time diminished but little his original enthusiasm, as the letters included in this volume will bear testimony, though in later years one by one his early friendships were chilled and abandoned. One of the charges frequently brought against Lafcadio Hearn by his critics in after years was that he was inconstant in his relations with his friends. Mr. Tunison says of him:—
“He had a fashion of dropping his friends one by one, or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing. Whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit would be hard to say, but he never spoke ill of them afterwards. He seemed to forget all about them, though two or three acquaintances of his early years of struggle and privation were always after spoken of with the tenderest regard, and their companionship was eagerly sought whenever this was possible.”
The charge of inconstancy is, to those who knew Lafcadio Hearn well, of a sufficiently serious nature to warrant some analysis at this point, while dealing with the subject of his first intimacies, for up to this period he appears to have had no ties other than those, so bitterly ruptured, with the people of his own blood, or the mere passing amities of school-boy life. That many of his closest friendships were either broken abruptly or sank into abeyance is quite true, but the reason for this was explicable in several ways. The first and most comprehensible cause was his inherent shyness of nature and an abnormal sensitiveness, which his early experiences intensified to a point not easily understood by those of a naturally self-confident temperament unqualified by blighting childish impressions. A look, a word, which to the ordinary robust nature would have had no meaning of importance, touched the quivering sensibilities of the man like a searing acid, and stung him to an anguish of resentment and bitterness which nearly always seemed fantastically out of proportion to the offender, and this bitterness was usually misjudged and resented. Only those cursed with similar sensibilities—“as tender as the horns of cockled snails”—could understand and forgive such an idiosyncrasy. It must be remembered that all qualities have their synchronous defects. The nature which is as reflective as water to the subtlest shades of the colour and form of life must of its essential character be subject to rufflement by the lightest breath of harshness or misconception.
Professor Chamberlain, who himself suffered from this tendency to unwarranted estrangement, has dealt with another phase of the matter with a noble sympathy too rare among Hearn’s friends. He says, in a letter to the biographer:—
“The second point was his attitude toward his friends,—his quondam friends,—all of whom he gradually dropped, with but very few exceptions. Some I know who were deeply and permanently irritated by this neglect, or ingratitude, as they termed it. I never could share such a feeling, though of course I lamented the severance of connection with one so gifted, and made two or three attempts at a renewal of intercourse, which were met at first by cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing me to desist from further endeavours. The reason I could not resent this was because Lafcadio’s dropping of his friends seemed to me to have its roots in that very quality which made the chief charm of his works. I mean his idealism. Friends, when he first made them, were for him more than mere mortal men, they stood endowed with every perfection. He painted them in the beautiful colours of his own fancy, and worshipped them, pouring out at their feet all the passionate emotionalism of his Greek nature. But Lafcadio was not emotional merely; another side of his mind had the keen insight of a man of science. Thus he soon came to see that his idols had feet of clay, and—being so purely subjective in his judgements—he was indignant with them for having, as he thought, deceived him. Add to this that the rigid character of his philosophical opinions made him perforce despise, as intellectual weaklings, all those who did not share them, or shared them only in a lukewarm manner,—and his disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable. For no man living, except himself, idolized Herbert Spencer in his peculiar way; turning Spencer’s scientific speculations into a kind of mysticism. This mysticism became a religion to him. The slightest cavil raised against it was resented by him as a sacrilege. Thus it was hardly possible for him to retain old ties of friendship except with a few men whom he met on the plane of every-day life apart from the higher intellectual interests. Lafcadio himself was a greater sufferer from all this than any one else; for he possessed the affectionate disposition of a child, and suffered poignantly when sympathy was withdrawn, or—what amounted to the same—when he himself withdrew it. He was much to be pitied,—always wishing to love, and discovering each time that his love had been misplaced.”
To put the matter in its simplest form, he loved with a completeness and tenderness extremely rare among human beings. When he discovered—as all who love in this fashion eventually do—that the objects of his affection had no such tenderness to give in return, he felt himself both deceived and betrayed and allowed the relation to pass into the silence of oblivion.
There is still another facet of this subject which is made clear by some of the letters written in the last years of his life, when he had withdrawn himself almost wholly from intercourse with all save his immediate family. Failing strength warned him that not many more years remained in which to complete his self-imposed task, and like a man who nears his goal with shortening breath and labouring pulse, he let slip one by one every burden, and cast from him his dearest possessions, lest even the weight of one love should hold him back from the final grasp upon the ideal he had so long pursued with avid heart. This matter has been dwelt upon at some length, and somewhat out of due place, but the charge of disloyalty to friendship is a serious one, and a full understanding of the facts upon which it rested is important to a comprehension of the man.
In these early days in Cincinnati, however, no blight had yet come upon his young friendships, and they proved a source of great delight. Krehbiel was already deeply immersed in studies of folk-songs and folk-music,—his collection of which has since become famous,—and Lafcadio threw himself with enthusiasm into similar studies, his natural love for exotic lore rendering them peculiarly sympathetic to his genius. Together they ransacked the libraries for discoveries, and sought knowledge at first hand from wandering minstrels in Chinese laundries, or from the exiles of many lands who gathered in the polyglot slums along the river-banks. In the dedication of “Some Chinese Ghosts” is recorded an echo of one of these experiences, when Krehbiel opened the heart of a reserved Oriental to give up to them all his knowledge, by proving that he himself could play their strange instruments and sing their century-old songs. The dedication runs thus:—