To My Friend,
Henry Edward Krehbiel,
The Musician,
Who, Speaking the Speech of Melody unto the
Children of Ten-Hia,—
Unto the Wandering Tsing-Jin, Whose Skins
Have the Colour of Gold,—
Moved Them to Make Strange Sounds upon the
Serpent-Bellied San-Hien;
Persuaded Them to Play for Me upon the
Shrieking Ya-Hien;
Prevailed on Them to Sing Me a Song of Their
Native Land,—
The Song of Mohli-Wa.
The Song of the Jasmine-Flower.
This dedication is of peculiar interest; “Chinese Ghosts” has been long out of print, and of the few copies issued—nearly the whole edition was destroyed—but a handful still exist. It gives a typical example of the musical, rhythmic prose which the young reporter was endeavouring to master. He had fallen under the spell of the French Romantic school and of their passion for le mot juste, of their love for exotic words, of their research for the grotesque, the fantastic, the bizarre. Already out of his tiny income he was extracting what others in like case spent upon comforts or pleasures, to buy dictionaries and thesauri, and was denying himself food and clothes to purchase rare books. The works of Théophile Gautier were his daily companions, in which he saturated his mind with fantasies of the Orient, Spain, and Egypt, refreshing himself after the dull routine of the day’s work with endeavours to transliterate into English the strange and monstrous tales of his model, those abnormal imaginations whose alien aroma almost defied transference into a less supple tongue.
His friend Tunison, writing of Hearn at this period, says:—
“But it was impossible for even this slavery of journalism to crush out of him his determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of the morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of columns in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating from Gautier.”
These translations—including “Clarimonde,” “Arria Marcella,” and “King Candaule”—with three others were published in 1882 under the title of the initial tale, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” having been gathered from the “Nouvelles,” and the “Romans et Contes.” The preface concludes thus:
“It is the artist who must judge of Gautier’s creations. To the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, to the lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth,—of the charm of youthful dreams and young passion in its blossoming,—of poetic ambitions and the sweet pantheism that finds all Nature vitalized by the Spirit of the Beautiful,—to such the first English version of these graceful phantasies is offered in the hope that it may not be found wholly unworthy of the original.”
Up to this time no translation into English of Gautier’s “Contes” had been attempted, and the manuscript sought a publisher in vain for half a dozen years. Later, when the little volume had reached a small but appreciative audience, another English version was attempted by Andrew Lang, but proved an unsuccessful rival, lacking the warmth and fidelity of its predecessor.
Other attempts in the same direction met with no better success, partly, in some cases, because of the reluctance any Anglo-Saxon publisher inevitably feels in issuing works which would encounter no barriers of rigid decorum between themselves and the world of French readers. The youthful artist working in any medium is prone to be impatient of the prejudices of Anglo-Saxon pudency. The beautiful is to him always its own justification for being, and his inexperience makes him unafraid of the nudities of art. The refusal to deal freely with any form of beauty seems to him as bloodlessly pietistic as the priest’s excision of “the breasts of the nymphs in the brake.” Yet many years after, when the boy had himself become the father of a boy and began to think of his son’s future, he said: “What shall I do with him? ... send him to grim Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord?—I am beginning to think that really much of the ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded on the best experience of man under civilization; and I understand lots of things I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom.”