Who was, what time she lived,
The loveliest in the land.
The fleeting archaic flavour of the original is not entirely lost here, and the lines are broken, yet metrical. But this is only a suggestion, and a kindly one.”
This book—his first—travelled far before finding a publisher, and then only at the cost of the author bearing half the expense of publication.
Other notices had been less kind. The Observer, as he quotes in a letter to Mr. Hart, had declared that it was a collection of “stories of unbridled lust without the apology of natural passion,” and that “the translation reeked with the miasma of the brothel.” The Critic had wasted no time upon the translator, confining itself to depreciation of Gautier, and this Hearn resented more than severity to himself, for at this period Gautier and his style were his passionate delight, as witness the following note which accompanied a loan of a volume containing a selection from the Frenchman’s poems:—
Dear Miss Bisland,—I venture to try to give you a little novel pleasure by introducing you to the “Emaux et Camées.” As you have told me you never read them, I feel sure you will experience a literary surprise. You will find in Gautier a perfection of melody, a warmth of word-colouring, a voluptuous delicacy which no English poet has ever approached and which reveal, I think, a certain capacity of artistic expression no Northern tongue can boast. What the Latin tongues yield in to Northern languages is strength; but the themes in which the Latin poets excel are usually soft and exquisite. Still you will find in the “Rondalla” some fine specimens of violence. It is the song of the Toreador Juan.
These “Emaux et Camées” constitute Gautier’s own pet selection from his works. I have seen nothing in Hugo’s works to equal some of them.... I won’t presume to offer you this copy: it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this “parfait magicien des lettres françaises” (as Baudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy....
Mr. John Albee wrote to him in connection with the book, and also the Reverend Wayland D. Ball.
“Stray Leaves from Strange Literature”—published by James R. Osgood and Company of Boston—followed in 1884 and was more kindly treated by the critics, though it brought fewer letters from private admirers, and was not very profitable—save to his reputation. In 1885 a tiny volume was issued under the title of “Gombo Zhêbes,” being a collection of 350 Creole proverbs which he had made while studying the patois of the Louisiana negro—a patois of which the local name is “Gombo.” These laborious studies of the grammar and oral literature of a tongue spoken only by and to negro servants in Louisiana seemed rather a work of supererogation at the time, but later during his life in the West Indies they proved of incalculable value to him in his intercourse with the inhabitants. There the patois—not having been subjected as in New Orleans to that all-absorbing solvent of the English tongue—continued to hold its own alongside the pure French of the educated Creoles, and his book would have been impossible had he not had command of the universal speech of the common people.