The slavery to ignoble journalism, what he calls a "really nefarious profession," was to be resolutely renounced from the day of his arrival in New Orleans. It is "a horrid life," he "could not stand the gaslight;" he "damned reportorial work and correspondence, and the American disposition to work people to death, and the American delight in getting worked to death;" he rebelled against becoming a part of the revolving machinery of a newspaper, because "journalism dwarfs, stifles, emasculates thought and style," and he was bound to "produce something better in point of literary execution."
There was also a not frankly confessed resolve to become respectable in other ways, and to be done with a kind of entanglement of which he was painfully conscious in the Cincinnati life. "I think I can redeem myself socially here! I have got into good society;" "it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio," he writes, and he is proud of living in a Latin city. He recognizes what Mr. Krehbiel calls his "peculiar and unfortunate disposition," and which he later sets forth as "a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, variable, nervous disposition." Hearn visits a few friends awhile and then disappears for six months, so that he wishes to be hidden in New York except to Krehbiel and Tunison; he will pay a visit to the others he must see just before leaving town—for he is a "demophobe." He tried a secret partnership in keeping a restaurant, and thought to carry on a little French bookstore. He resolved at different times to go to Europe, to Cuba, to Texas, to Cincinnati, and planned all sorts of occupations.
The indications soon multiply that in more ways than in worldly matters he is at variance with his world. He "regards thought as a mechanical process;" he has "no faith in any faith;" "individual life is a particle of that eternal force of which we know so little;" "Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul;" Jesus is a legend and myth; he is "not a believer in free will, nor in the individual soul," etc. Think of a man writing to a Christian minister, think of a Christian minister receiving without protest a personal letter with this in it: "Nor can I feel more reverence for the crucified deity than for that image of the Hindoo god of light holding in one of his many hands Phallus, and yet wearing a necklace of skulls, etc."
And Hearn, as to ethics, has the courage to write his friend of his convictions: "Passion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the mother of language; its gratification the act of a creator, and the divinest rite of Nature's temple." In other letters, unpublished, that exist, Hearn is morbidly frank as to sexual licence and practices. In tropical cities there is "no time for friendship—only passion for women, and brief acquaintance for men." Without the influence of sexualism there can be no real greatness; "the mind remains arid and desolate," and he quotes approvingly:—"Virginity, Mysticism, Melancholy—three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by the Christ," etc. "I do not find it possible to persuade myself that the 'mad excess of love' should not be indulged in by mankind," introduces a brilliant page upon the theme, ending with, "after all what else do we live for—ephemeræ that we are?" To my protest he wrote, "'Moral' feelings are those into which the sexual instinct does not visibly enter;" and again, "The sexual sense never tells a physical lie. It only tells an ethical one." There is, to be sure, no answer to a man who says such things.
It is astonishing, how conscious and at the same time how careless Hearn was of his characteristics and trends. In 1878 he could coldly prepare to attempt a get-rich-quick scheme, "a fraud, which will pay like hell, an advertising fraud," etc., because "there is no money in honest work." At this time also he knew that his own wandering passion was "the strongest of all," and that his deepest desire was "to wander forever here and there until he should get old and apish and grey and die." His misfortunes he confessed were of his own making because it was absolutely out of the question for him to "keep any single situation for any great length of time," hating the mere idea of it, "impossible to stay anywhere without getting into trouble." "No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I," he correctly avows. He recognizes that "the unexpected obstacle to success was usually erected by himself."
He acknowledges his ignorance and escapes from it and from the labour, expense, and duty of scholarship by flying, as many others have done, to the world of Imagination, which alone is left to him. "It allows of a vagueness of expression which hides the absence of real knowledge, and dispenses with the necessity of technical precision and detail." He "never reads a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination." Knowing that he has not true and real genius, he "pledges himself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits my temperament," and he "hopes to succeed in attracting some little attention." The monstrous, the enormous, and the lurid, is sought in the letters. The sentence at the bottom of page 226, Volume One of the "Life and Letters," and the ghastly story, pages 322-323, show the gruesome still much alive, and page 306 that blood, fury, and frenzy haunt his nightmare dreams. "In history one should only seek the extraordinary, the monstrous, the terrible; in mythology the most fantastic and sensuous, just as in romance," And yet he defends himself as a lover of Greek art, detests "the fantastic beauty that is Gothic," yet prides himself on being Arabesque. Even the love of Beaudelaire creeps in, and the brutal, horrible photograph of Gautier is "grander than he imagined." Of course to such a mind Matthew Arnold is a "colossal humbug"—and worse.
With increasing frequency are repeated the complaints of disillusionment; he is frightened at the loss even of the love of the beautiful, and his friend tries in vain to rouse him from his ghost-life and dreaming. There are absurd excuses why he cannot work; when among beautiful things he cannot write of them, when he is away he is longing for them; there are months when he cannot do anything, and a little thing is produced with great pain and labour. "The old enthusiasm has completely died out of me." The people and the city are adequately cursed, and upon the debilitating climate is laid a proper and ever-repeated anathema. He loathes the North, especially New York City, "shudders at the bare idea of cold;" he yearns and pines for a still more tropical country which he knows may kill him, and which came near doing so. The Wanderlust is upon him as passages on pages 183, 193, 196, 197, 207, 215, 223, 224, 398 of Volume One of the "Life and Letters" illustrate. At last he is off for Martinique, where work and even thought are still more impossible because of the benumbing heat.
Here follows a list of the unsigned editorials contributed by Hearn to his paper. It is made up from two of the scrap-books left me, and is entitled:
SUNDAY AND SPECIAL EDITORIALS BY LAFCADIO
HEARN FOR THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT, 1885-1887.
1. The "Peronospora Ferrani" and Cholera Vaccination.
2. Literary Pessimism.
3. "The Song Celestial."
4. The Canonization of the Mahdi.
5. "Successor of Tamerlane."
6. The World's Journalism.
7. A Scientific Novelty.
8. The Jewish Question in Europe (Suppressed by the management).
9. Russian Literature Abroad.
10. The European Trouble.
11. Missionaries as Linguists.
12. Courbet.
13. Poetry and Pay.
14. The Present and Future of India.
15. An Archaeological Novel.
16. An Evolutional History.
17. A New Pompeii.
18. Archæology in Cambodia.
19. The Great "I-Am."
20. A Terrible Novel.
21. The Latin Church in the East and Bismarck.
22. English Policy in China.
23. The Fear of Death.
24. A Danger to Egypt—The Senousiya.
25. Archaeological News from China.
26. Icelandic Prospects.
27. A Great English Physician.
28. Academical Triumphs.
29. The Magician of Paris.
30. Tolstoi's Vanity of Wisdom.
31. "Minos."
32. Newspapers and Religion.
33. Minos.
34. A Concord Compromise.
35. De Mercier on Dante.
36. The Origin of Christmas.
37. "Immortality" according to Dr. Holland.
38. The Future of Idealism.
39. "Solitude."
40. Dr. Holland's Defenders.
41. The Religion of Suffering.
42. The Ruins of Carthage.
43. A Defence of Pessimism.
44. Over-Education in Germany.
45. Decadence as a Fine Art.
46. Use of the Eye or the Ear in Learning Languages.
47. The Shadow of the "Light of Asia."
48. The Jew upon the Stage.
49. Some Theosophical Iconoclasm.
50. "Hamlet's Note-Book."
51. The Invasion of the Desert.
52. Resurrected Æstheticism.
53. Translations.
54. Nihilistic Literature in the United States.
55. Some Human Frailty.
56. An Art-Reformer.
57. Some Notes on Creole Literature.
58. The Scientific Value of Creole.
59. "l'Œuvre."
60. A Havanese Romance.
61. Some Supposed Sanscrit Translations.
62. The Omnivorous Newspaper.
63. A Religious Nightmare.
64. Joaquin Miller.
65. Pictures vs. Text.
66. "Follow the Donkey Path."
67. A Sketch of the Creole Patois.
68. In Spain.
69. Chinese Belief in God.
70. "Towards the Gulf."
71. Tennyson's Locksley Hall.
72. "Doesn't Want Any Progress."
73. The Howard Memorial Library—A Letter from Charles Dudley Warner.
74. A Definitive Rossetti.
75. The Chinese Future.
76. Artistic Value of Myopia.
77. Colours and Emotions.