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.