I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it to a morbid degree. Any place rather than Cincinnati would have been better for the happiness and success of the emigrating boy, but his relatives had ridded themselves of the burden by assenting to his wish. Excepting that to Japan, the only sensible move he made was from Cincinnati toward the tropics, to the half-way house thither—New Orleans. The desire to seek the au delà was present, his friends tell me, throughout the stay in Cincinnati. Perhaps the single city in the world which would satisfy his dream more nearly than could any other, was New Orleans. Being psychologically for the most part of degenerate Latin stock, and especially of the French variety, with the requisite admixture of exotic and tropical barbarism; bathed, but not cooked, in the hot and brilliant sunshine he loved and hated; touched and energized by too little Teutonic blood and influence, New Orleans offered to the unhappy man the best possible surroundings for the growth of his talents. Adding to this fortunate concensus of circumstance and partly a corollary of it was the most fortunate of all accidents that could have occurred to him—that is, the existence of a daily newspaper such as the Times-Democrat; of a paying mass of subscribers relishing Hearn's translations from the most artistic French writers of the short-story; and, most important of all, the presence on the bridge of the noble Captain of the Newspaper enterprise, the veteran editor, Mr. Page M. Baker. One shudders to think what would have been Hearn's later career had it not been for the guidance and help of this wise, sympathetic and magnanimous friend. For the one thing needed by Hearn in those who would be his friends rather than their own was magnanimity. It was his frequent misfortune in life to come under the influence of those as incapable of true unselfishness and real kindness as it was natural for them to be cunning and to use an assumed friendship for hidden flatteries and purposes of their own. Most of these would not have dreamed of associating with the man for any reason other than to stand in the reflected light of his literary fame. Most of them had as little care for his poetic prose, and as little appreciation or knowledge of good literature as they had of "the enclitic de." They had no magnanimity, only wile instead of it. As Hearn was also deprived of large-mindedness in all affairs of the world, he was unhappily prone to accept the offered bribe. He wanted above all things to be flattered and to do as his imperious impulses and weak will suggested. Any one who recognized these things in him and seconded the follies, remained his permitted "friend," but those who withstood them in the least and ran counter to his morbid trends and resolves—these were speedily "dropped," and insulted or grieved to silence. If they had magnanimity, they bore with the man in pity and answered his insults with kind words and kinder deeds. They recognized that they were responsible not to the man but to the carrier of a great talent, and although they might not forget, they gladly forgave, if possibly they might speed him on his predestined way.
Of this number was Baker. Directly or indirectly through him, came a long and happy period of life; came the congenial, educating work, without slavery, of the translations and other easy reportorial services. Of equal importance were the financial rewards. Before and after the New Orleans time not the least of Hearn's misfortunes was his intolerable and brutalizing improvidence and impecuniousness. Under Baker's friendship he came to what for such a person was affluence and independence. He found leisure to read and study and think outside of the journalistic pale, and better still, perhaps,—better to his thinking, at least—he secured the means to indulge his life-long desire for curious and out-of-the-way books. During this time it grew to consciousness with him that in everything, except as regards his beloved Art, he had a little learned to recognize the worth of money.
But within him grew ever stronger the plague of the unsatisfied, the sting of unrest, and he was compelled to obey. In a letter to me from Martinique, after he had recognized his mistake, he admits and explains as follows:
I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of the intellectual life are all lacking here,—no libraries, no books in any language;—a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for months.
But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more daily,—that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish things,—that life is very sweet without them;—and you actually find yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for life in the North are all madness,—that they wasted years which might have been delightfully dozed away in a land where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot.
I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a while,—a short while, probably;—but I do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become tired of places,—or at least of the disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,—the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;—and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;—yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. One feels it least, I imagine, in the tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to do:—To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;—to keep it requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it in very short order.
I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went to Demerara and visited the lesser West Indies in July and August of last year,—returned to New York after three months with some MS.,—sold it,—felt very unhappy at the idea of staying in New York, where I had good offers,—suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics by the same steamer that had brought me. I had no commission, resolved to trust to magazine-work. So far I have just been able to scrape along;—the climate numbs mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for won't come. The real—surpassing imagination—whelms the ideal out of sight and hearing. The world is young here,—not old and wise and grey as in the North; and one must not seek the Holy Ghost in it. I suspect that the material furnished by the tropics can only be utilized in a Northern atmosphere. We will talk about it together.
That he never thought to return to New Orleans is demonstrated by the fact that when he left, he shipped his books to another good friend and great editor, Mr. Alden, to keep for him. When he came to the United States in 1889, he fully intended returning to some tropical land. But it was otherwise ordered, and most fortunately, for a year or two more of life under such conditions would have killed both mind and body.
Upon Hearn's arrival in New Orleans, he began sending a series of charming letters to the Cincinnati Commercial, signed "Ozias Midwinter."[11] They are, indeed, exquisite, and as certainly of a delicacy and beauty which must have made the reader of that time and newspaper wonder what strange sort of a correspondent the editor had secured. The first letter was about Memphis, passed on his way South. I cite some parts to show how the gruesome was merging into or being supplanted by something larger and better, and also to illustrate Hearn's growing interest in colours.
[ [11] Kindly secured by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, Ohio, from a friend and lent to me.
The stranger, however, is apt to leave Memphis with one charming recollection of the place—the remembrance of the sunset scene from the bluffs across the river over Arkansas. I do not think that any part of the world can offer a more unspeakably beautiful spectacle to the traveller than what he may witness any fair evening from those rugged old bluffs at Memphis. The first time I saw it the day had been perfectly bright and clear,—the blue of the sky was unclouded by the least fleecy stain of white cloud; and the sun descended in the west,—not in a yellow haze, or a crimson fog, but with the splendour of his fiery glory almost undimmed. He seemed to leave no trace of his bright fires behind him; and the sky-blue began to darken into night-purple from the east almost immediately. I thought at first it was one of the least romantic sunsets I had ever seen. It was not until the stars were out, and the night had actually fallen, that I beheld the imperial magnificence of that sunset.
I once thought, when sailing up the Ohio one bright Northern summer, that the world held nothing more beautiful than the scenery of the Beautiful River—those voluptuous hills with their sweet feminine curves, the elfin gold of that summer haze, and the pale emerald of the river's verdure-reflecting breast. But even the loveliness of the Ohio seemed faded, and the Northern sky-blue palely cold, like the tint of iceberg pinnacles, when I beheld for the first time the splendour of the Mississippi.
"You must come on deck early to-morrow," said the kind Captain of the Thompson Dean; "we are entering the Sugar Country."
So I saw the sun rise over the cane-fields of Louisiana.
It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its setting at Memphis, but of another colour;—an auroral flush of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests of cocoanut palms. Then the day broke gently and slowly—a day too vast for a rapid dawn—a day that seemed deep as Space. I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a vaulted church-roof beside that sky—a sky so softly beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite.
And the giant river broadened to a mile—smooth as a mirror, still and profound as a mountain lake. Between the vastness of the sky and the vastness of the stream, we seemed moving suspended in the midst of day, with only a long, narrow tongue of land on either side breaking the brightness. Yet the horizon never became wholly blue. The green-golden glow lived there all through the day; it was brightest in the south. It was so tropical, that glow;—it seemed of the Pacific, a glow that forms a background to the sight of lagoons and coral reefs and "lands where it is always afternoon."
Below this glow gleamed another golden green, the glory of the waving cane-fields beyond the trees. Huge sugar-mills were breathing white and black clouds into the sky, as they masticated their mighty meal; and the smell of saccharine sweetness floated to us from either shore. Then we glided by miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls; and by the mouths of broad bayous;—past swamps dark with cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient trees;—past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot through with gold. The magnificent old mansions of the Southern planters, built after a generous fashion unknown in the North, with broad verandas and deliciously cool porches, and all painted white or perhaps a pale yellow, looked out grandly across the water from the hearts of shadowy groves; and, like villages of a hundred cottages, the negro quarters dotted the verdant face of the plantation with far-gleaming points of snowy whiteness.
And still that wondrous glow brightened in the south, like a far-off reflection of sunlight on the Spanish Main.
"But it does not look now as it used to in the old slave days," said the pilot, as he turned the great wheel. "The swamps were drained, and the plantations were not overgrown with cottonwood; and somehow or other the banks usen't to cave in then as they do now."
I saw indeed signs of sad ruin on the face of the great plantations; there were splendid houses crumbling to decay, and whole towns of tenantless cabins; estates of immense extent were lying almost unfilled, or with only a few acres under cultivation; and the vigorous cottonwood trees had shot up in whole forests over fields once made fertile by the labour of ten thousand slaves. The scene was not without its melancholy; it seemed tinged by the reflection of a glory passed away—the glory of wealth, and the magnificence of wealth; of riches and the luxury of riches.
O fair paradise of the South, if still so lovely in thy ruin, what must thou have been in the great day of thy greatest glory!
White steamboats, heavily panting under their loads of cotton, came toiling by, and called out to us wild greeting long and shrill, until the pilot opened the lips of our giant boat, and her mighty challenge awoke a thousand phantom voices along the winding shore. Red sank the sun in a sea of fire, and bronze-hued clouds piled up against the light, like fairy islands in a sea of glory, such as were seen, perhaps, by the Adelantado of the Seven Cities.
"Those are not real clouds," said the pilot, turning to the west, his face aglow with the yellow light. "Those are only smoke clouds rising from the sugar mills of Louisiana, and drifting with the evening wind."
The daylight died away and the stars came out, but that warm glow in the southern horizon only paled, so that it seemed a little further off. The river broadened till it looked with the tropical verdure of its banks like the Ganges, until at last there loomed up a vast line of shadows, dotted with points of light, and through a forest of masts and a host of phantom-white river boats and a wilderness of chimneys the Thompson Dean, singing her cheery challenge, steamed up to the mighty levee of New Orleans.
The letters descriptive of New Orleans scenes and life deserve republishing had I space for them here. In a brief paragraph, a sentence perhaps, almost in a word, is given the photograph, chromatic and vitalized in Hearn's unrivalled picturesque style, of the levees, the shipping, the sugar-landing, the cotton-shipping, the ocean steamers, the strange mixture of peoples from all countries and climes; the architecture, streets, markets, etc. The Vendetta of the Sicilian immigrants is described with a strength and vividness which bear eloquent witness to Hearn's innate pleasure in such themes. There is also shown his beginning the study of Creole character, grammar, and language. A peculiarly striking picture is painted of the new huge cotton-press, as a monster whose jaws open with a low roar to devour the immense bale of cotton and to crush it to a few inches of thickness. I cannot exclude this excerpt:
Do you remember that charming little story, "Père Antoine's Date-Palm," written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published in the same volume with "Marjorie Daw" and other tales?
Père Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and died in New Orleans. As a boy, he conceived a strong friendship for a fellow student of about his own age, who, in after years, sailed to some tropical island in the Southern Seas, and wedded some darkly beautiful woman, graceful and shapely and tall as a feathery palm. Père Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friendship strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also passed from the world; but they left a little daughter for some one to take care of.
The good priest, of course, took care of her, and brought her up at New Orleans. And she grew up graceful and comely as her mother, with all the wild beauty of the South. But the child could not forget the glory of the tropics, the bright lagoon, the white-crested sea roaring over the coral reef, the royal green of the waving palms, and the beauty of the golden-feathered birds that chattered among them.
So she pined for the tall palms and the bright sea and the wild reef, until there came upon her that strange homesickness which is death; and still dreaming of the beautiful palms, she gradually passed into that great sleep which is dreamless. And she was buried by Père Antoine near his own home.
By and by, above the little mound there suddenly came a gleam of green; and mysteriously, slowly, beautifully, there grew up towering in tropical grace above the grave, a princely palm. And the old priest knew that it had grown from the heart of the dead child.
So the years passed by, and the roaring city grew up about the priest's home and the palm-tree, trying to push Père Antoine off his land. But he would not be moved. They piled up gold upon his doorsteps and he laughed at them; they went to law with him and he beat them all; and, at last, dying, he passed away true to his trust; for the man who cuts down that palm-tree loses the land that it grows upon.
"And there it stands," says the Poet, "in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady, whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamoured. May the hand wither that touches her ungently!"
Now I was desirous above all things to visit the palm made famous by this charming legend, and I spent several days in seeking it. I visited the neighbourhood of the old Place d'Armes—now Jackson Square—and could find no trace of it; then I visited the southern quarter of the city, with its numberless gardens, and I sought for the palm among groves of orange-trees overloaded with their golden fruit, amid broad-leaved bananas, and dark cypresses, and fragrant magnolias and tropical trees of which I did not know the names. Then I found many date-palms. Some were quite young, with their splendid crest of leafy plumes scarcely two feet above the ground; others stood up to a height of thirty or forty feet. Whenever I saw a tall palm, I rang the doorbell and asked if that were Père Antoine's date-palm. Alas! nobody had ever heard of the Père Antoine.
Then I visited the ancient cathedral, founded by the pious Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor of New Orleans, one hundred and fifty years ago; and I asked the old French priest whether they had ever heard of the Père Antoine. And they answered me that they knew him not, after having searched the ancient archives of the ancient Spanish Cathedral.
Once I found a magnificent palm, loaded with dates, in a garden on St. Charles Street, so graceful that I felt the full beauty of Solomon's simile as I had never felt it before: "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree." I rang the bell and made inquiry concerning the age of the tree. It was but twenty years old; and I went forth discouraged.
At last, to my exceeding joy, I found an informant in the person of a good-natured old gentleman, who keeps a quaint bookstore in Commercial Place. The tree was indeed growing, he said, in New Orleans Street, near the French Cathedral, and not far from Congo Square; but there were many legends concerning it. Some said it had been planted over the grave of some Turk or Moor—perhaps a fierce corsair from Algiers or Tunis—who died while sailing up the Mississippi, and was buried on its moist shores. But it was not at all like the other palm-trees in the city, nor did it seem to him to be a date-palm. It was a real Oriental palm; yea, in sooth, such a palm as Solomon spake of in his Love-song of Love-songs.
"I said, I will go up to the palm-tree; I will take hold of the boughs thereof." ...
I found it standing in beautiful loneliness in the centre of a dingy woodshed on the north side of New Orleans Street, towering about forty feet above the rickety plank fence of the yard. The gateway was open, and a sign swung above it bearing the name, "M. Michel." I walked in and went up to the palm-tree. A labourer was sawing wood in the back-shed, and I saw through the windows of the little cottage by the gate a family at dinner. I knocked at the cottage-door, and a beautiful Creole woman opened it.
"May I ask, Madame, whether this palm-tree was truly planted by the Père Antoine?"
"Ah, Monsieur, there are many droll stories which they relate of that tree. There are folks who say that a young girl was interred there, and it is also said that a Sultan was buried under that tree—or the son of a Sultan. And there are also some who say that a priest planted it."
"Was it the Père Antoine, Madame?"
"I do not know, Monsieur. There are people also who say that it was planted here by Indians from Florida. But I do not know whether such trees grow in Florida. I have never seen any other palm-tree like it. It is not a date-palm. It flowers every year, with a beautiful yellow blossom the colour of straw, and the blossoms hang down in pretty curves. Oh, it is very graceful! Sometimes it bears fruit, a kind of oily fruit, but not dates. I am told that they make oil from the fruit of such palms."
I thought it looked so sad, that beautiful tree in the dusty woodyard, with no living green thing near it. As its bright verdant leaves waved against the blue above, one could not but pity it as one would pity some being, fair and feminine and friendless in a strange land. "Oh, c'est bien gracieux," murmured the handsome Creole lady.
"Is it true, Madame, that the owner of the land loses it if he cuts down the tree?"
"Mais oui! But the proprietors of the ground have always respected the tree, because it is so old, so very old!"
Then I found the proprietor of the land, and he told me that when the French troops first arrived in this part of the country they noticed that tree. "Why," I exclaimed, "that must have been in the reign of Louis XIV!" "It was in 1679, I believe," he answered. As for the Père Antoine, he had never heard of him. Neither had he heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. So that I departed, mourning for my dead faith in a romance which was beautiful.