A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

Then swiftly following:

Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;—midsummer in the pest-smitten city of New Orleans.

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;—the lukewarm river yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. The nights began with a black heat;—there were hours when the acrid air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the bronchial tubing;—then, toward morning it would grow chill with venomous vapors, with morbific dews—till the sun came up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-heat. And the interminable procession of mourners and hearses and carriages again began to circulate between the centers of life and death;—and long trains of steamships rushed from the port with heavy burden of fugitives.

Then terror that lays cold hands on the heart: Julian dying of fever.

From New Orleans he went in 1887 to the Windward Islands for new sensation, new color, new barbaric areas of human life. Two Years in the French West Indies is the literary result of it, a chaotic book, flashlights, impressions, but no single completed impression, no totality, but the soul of the West Indies none the less, revealed with a rare, queer art that was individual. But no place, not even those Circe islands which he paints as the dream and the ultimate of human desire, could detain him long. Fickleness was in his blood, wandering was his birthright. Again he is in New York, and then with a commission from the Harpers he sails to Japan, where, in the rush and tumult of new sensation, he forgets his commission and loses himself completely in the new delicious world of impression.

For Hearn was as unpractical as Shelley and he was without Shelley's ideals and altruistic dreams. He lived in a vague world of vision, of sensation, of intangible beauty. He could say of himself:

Always having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical matters that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. Nothing, for example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden. Nothing about what a man ought to do under any possible circumstances. I know nothing but sensation and books.

Though he was now forty, he entered this new world as one new born into it. He adopted its costume, he slept with his head on a wooden pillow, he acquired citizenship, he married a Japanese wife and established a Japanese home, and he even went over completely to the Buddhist religion.

The book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894, marks the beginning of his second literary period. Henceforth his writings center about Japan. He wrote no treatise, no serious study of actual conditions; he wrote impressions, fragmentary suggestions of the Japan that was passing away, the romantic Japan of the ideal old régime, survivals of which he found everywhere. Japanese art and Japanese romance found in him a curious affinity. They mellowed and soothed the tumultuous spirit of his first art period. His impressionism became more subtly suggestive, more magically vague, more daintily colored. There had always been within him a strong element of mysticism, legacy of his Irish ancestry, and the subtly mystical side of Buddhism appealed to it strongly. He was able to interpret it for occidental comprehension, and he was able to make more comprehensible the subtle connotation of Japanese art, and to catch the subtler inner consciousness of Japan as no other of the Western world has ever caught it. In his first enthusiasm he wrote:

This is a land where one can really enjoy the Inner Life. Every one has an inner life of his own—which no other life can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, though occasionally when we create something beautiful we betray a faint glimpse of it.

But the newness of this new world he had entered wore away at length. He was a creature of enthusiastic moments and he needed swift changes of sensation. He had reveled in the old, ideal Japan, but he found himself unable to live in it. A new régime had begun. He was filled with contempt at what he called "the frank selfishness, the apathetic vanity, the shallow, vulgar skepticism of the new Japan that prates its contempt about Tempo times, and ridicules the dear old men of the premeiji era." His last years were bitter with financial embarrassment, and full of feverish literary creation for the sake of his growing family. The glow and fervor and genius of his first period faded more and more from his work;—he himself faded out. He felt the gulf that he had erected between himself and his race. To his sister he wrote: "I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me homesick for English life." He died of his own vehemence, worn out by oversensation, unnerved by restlessness and nostalgia and longing for he knew not what.

The likeness of Hearn to De Quincey is almost complete. He had De Quincey's irresoluteness, his jangling nerves, his dominating fancy, his discursiveness, his gorgeous imagination, his oriental soul hampered with the fetters of occidental science. He too was essentially fragmentary in his literary output, a man of intense moods intensely painted, a man of books but of no single, unified, compelling book. One may not read essays like "Gothic Horror" or "The Nightmare Touch," or a passage like this from "Vespertina Cognitio," and not think of the great English opium-eater: