This unavailing struggle to find an outlet for the expression of something more worthy of his abilities than the sensational side of journalism caused him the deepest discouragement and depression; and his youthful ardour, denied a safe channel for its forces, turned to less healthful instincts. The years in Cincinnati were at times marred by experiments and outbursts, undertaken with bitter enthusiasm for fantastic ethical codes, and finally caused severance of his ties with his employers and the town itself. The tendency of his tastes toward the study of strange peoples and civilizations made him find much that was attractive in “the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, and led him to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study,”—says Joseph Tunison,—“things that were common to these people in their every-day life his vivid imagination transformed into romance.”
This led him eventually into impossible experiments, and brought upon him the resentment of his friends. Many years after, in Japan, he referred to this matter in a letter to one of his pupils, and the letter is so illuminative of this matter as to make it desirable to insert it here, though rightly it should be included in the volume dealing with his life in Japan.
Dear Ochiai,—I was very happy to get your kind letter, and the pleasant news it conveyed....
And now that all your trouble is over, perhaps you will sometimes find it hard not to feel angry with those who ostracized you for so long. It would at least be natural that you should feel angry with them, or with some at least. But I hope you will not allow yourself to feel anger towards them, even in your heart. Because the real truth is that it was not really your schoolmates who were offended: it only appeared so. The real feeling against you was what is called a national sentiment,—that jealous love of country with which every man is born, and which you, quite unknowingly, turned against you for a little while. So I hope you will love all your schoolmates none the less,—even though they treated you distantly for so long.
When I was a young man in my twenties, I had an experience very like yours. I resolved to take the part of some people who were much disliked in the place where I lived. I thought that those who disliked them were morally wrong,—so I argued boldly for them and went over to their side. Then all the rest of the people stopped speaking to me, and I hated them for it. But I was too young then to understand. There were other moral questions, much larger than those I had been arguing about, which really caused the whole trouble. The people did not know how to express them very well; they only felt them. After some years I discovered that I was quite mistaken—that I was under a delusion. I had been opposing a great national and social principle without knowing it. And if my best friends had not got angry with me, I could not have learned the truth so well,—because there are many things that are hard to explain and can only be taught by experience....
Ever very affectionately,
Your old teacher,
Lafcadio Hearn.
Kumamoto, March 27, 1894.
Sick, unhappy, and unpopular, flight to other scenes naturally suggested itself. Mr. Tunison thus describes the influences determining the move to New Orleans, which occurred in 1877:—