Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman

by George M. Gould

When he left my home, he, of his own accord, asked me to care for his library, then in the home of Mr. Alden at Metuchen, New Jersey, who two years previously had consented to take charge of it, and had paid shipping expenses, insurance, etc. None can imagine anything ungenerous or unkind in Mr. Alden. An old Cincinnati acquaintance characterizes Hearn's action in the matter as "a swindle." I have no knowledge or hint how it was or could be of that nature. Hearn wrote all the letters, and made all the arrangements to have the books sent to me. Mr. Alden authorizes me to say:

"I was perfectly convinced at the time of the transfer of the library to Dr. Gould that he had no desire for its possession, and that the transfer was made solely in accordance with Mr. Hearn's request. I am quite sure that Dr. Gould fully explained the matter to me at the time. I feel sure that Dr. Gould acted precisely as I should have done if I had retained possession of the library; that is, readily giving it up to any legitimate claimant." I found the books of no value to me, and they surely have been an expense. I tried, later, to prevail upon Hearn to allow me to ship them to him in Japan, but I never received any replies to my letters. He asked for the catalogue, some of the old books, and beside these, at his request, a number of expensive new books were at various times bought and sent to him. I suspect that as there was not a book on Japan in the collection, and as he had a plethora of data at hand such as he wanted, the library gathered with so much love and enthusiasm was no longer of use to him, especially under the conditions of his life there.

Hearn gained strength and power as regards both truth and art, in so far as he was true to the better in himself; all his trouble and his weakness were born out of the lower self he would not, or could not, sacrifice. His worship of the blood-curdling and revolting gave him some temporary vogue among the readers of yellow newspaperdom, but not until that was renounced for the compromise of the "odd and ghostly" did he begin to show an ability to reach something more worthy in human nature than the degenerate reporter catered to. The next step in advance was the cultivation of the artistic pornography of the sensualistic French story-writer. Not until he renounced this did he once more come to the something of more use to the reading world which fills the Martinique epoch. His disinclination to go to Japan, I more than suspect, was owing to a half consciousness that there was in that nation too much civilization, too good character, and even too much religion to suit the tastes which had been uppermost in motiving his past literary labours. His going into utter, illogical, and absurd captivity to the atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer was a sorry sacrifice of his nobler office and better destiny to the fate that relentlessly dogged his footsteps. He was forced into all the humanity and beneficence possible to him by Japanese restraint, art, and truth. His cries of disillusion over the Japanese were largely the anger of the semi-barbaric wanderer held by family ties, paternity, etc., when he found himself prevented from again seeking the faraway tropical pseudo-paradises of peoples but one remove from savagery.

In the pre-Japanese periods only the lurid, the monstrous, the enormous, only hot crime, and sexual passion, could excite his liveliest interest, and all great literature was as much ignored as if it did not exist. There is not a hint in all he did that he had read a line of the great creators of literature,—the Greek dramatists, Dante, Goethe, Shakespere, and a hundred more; he could not give time to read, much less study them. His pretension of ability to teach English literature was soon recognized even by the Japanese, and it is well that over-zealous friends did not secure him a lectureship at Cornell University. To be sure, he never had time to study even the history of his own science and art,—but he never would have done so, it is plain, if leisure and opportunity had been offered him. The ideal and the rewards of scholarship never entered his mind. Perhaps it was best for his peculiar office and proficiency that he allowed all erudition to go unlooked-upon. And yet if he had been possessed of sufficient virility and objectivity of mind to have learned the Japanese language, what would the labour not have been worth? That he could not read a Japanese book or newspaper after fourteen years of life among the people is most disconcerting. It is a tribute to the amazing delicacy and receptiveness of his mind that while he could not speak to his wife or children in their own tongue, he should still have so accurately caught the Japanese spirit and so admirably conveyed it to us.

The history of Hearn's ghoulish pleasure in the gruesome and sensualistic, runs from the tan-yard horror and Cincinnati reportorial days, through the translated stories of the New Orleans epoch, to his "St. Anthony." In "Stray Leaves" it is but little softened, and yet the atmosphere is brightening. It glitters and flashes like vengeful lightning about the clouds of his mind with the Martinique epoch, etc.; but in the Japanese writing even the "Mountain of Skulls" and other stories are so far removed from reality that our disgust sinks to a smile of sighing wonder that the gruesome could still be so loved by him. It is only a few of the brutal and a small brutalized public that seeks such contes drolatiques (without Balzac's wit, satire, and power, of course), and so again perforce, Hearn was weaned from his morbidities. Dominated by his developing art and also by the need to sell his writings, he thus rose, partly by the command of his readers, to the choice of less and less repulsive themes and methods, and, awed by the Japanese spirit of gentleness and beauty, he finally endowed their national soul-life with a prismatic glory which they themselves had hardly suspected.

Hearn deserted the god of religion, and, except in one respect, he was faithless to the god of ethics. He was, therefore, without any divinity. For a mind that had no creative ability, that must have its subjects furnished to it, a mind whose sole function was to colour the data chosen or given from without,—this inner emptiness could only be deceived by but could not be satisfied with the inner emptiness of Spencerism. He acknowledged that religion was the mother of all civilization, arts, and laws, and that all social systems, arts, and laws, antique or modern, were begotten and nurtured by ethics,—and yet there was no reality in, no reason for the existence of either religion or ethics in this world of mechanics and of fatalism, grim and inexorable.

Hearn speaks somewhere of his aspiration to be considered a "thinker," and once he praises "science" as a source of data for working into the art forms of his beloved poetic prose. But science to him was as impossible as was he to polite society; Spencer gave him leave, he thought, to consider his atheism, irreligion, and sensualisticism as scientifically authorized, and logically justified. He was always hankering after the old heathen, even savage, gods of his father and mother; and every time he went Fantee with them, he came back to a saner world weakened and still more at war with himself. He always sought an impossible world where Teutonic worth and honour could supply a decadent Latin, with half-savage languor and never failing delights of the senses and of art,—art which, in the last analysis, was his only god. But his tragedy was that he always hastened to turn his god into a fetich, while even his mind caught disquieting glimpses of the awful truth that all genuine worship abjures fetichism. As sensualism is the superstition of love, so fetichistic art is the superstition of true æsthetics.

For the most part, minds are mechanical not chemical compoundings, or if chemic, they are in very unstable equilibrium. There are strange and wayward traits, illogic and unfused to unity with the others. There may be psychopathic and isolation wards in the psyche, "retreats," and all manner of diseases of individual organs. Most people go Fantee, often or seldom, and are able to hide their fetichisms from even their best friends. If we observe ourselves at all, most of us wonder at the curious mix of self-contradictories in ourselves. The few whose souls and bodies are fused to clear-cut unity, the component metal melted to harmony in the foundry of Fate and of Purpose,—these clang loyally in absolute and precise tone-colour. In commoner folk the failure of the flux, and the flaws in the casting, have only a social significance, but with the Hearns, with thinkers and writers, the affair has an infinite purport.

Hearn could never make his writings and his art impulses square with his beloved materialistic, deterministic philosophy. He did not believe in soul or in souls, and yet his soul was always treating of souls, and showing the invisible thread of continuity which links souls to Soul. Therefore he is always happiest when his daimon breaks from the restraint of theory and fate and pictures the play of free spirit, of soul unconquered by fate, of life victorious over death in some sad way or bright.

Concerning Hearn's treatment of friends, editors, and publishers, as it bears sharply upon his literary character and productivity, as little as may or must be said: He was under bonds to Fate to abuse worst the majority of his friends who were most magnanimous, helpful, and kind to him personally, or who were most discriminating and encouraging toward his art and artistic ideals. To his former Cincinnati comrades, except the old printer-friend, he scarcely ever wrote after he left them, and the most faithful of these recently writes me: "I never pretended to be a friend to him; I was merely one to whom he resorted when all the rest cast him out. He never found me wanting, but he got few letters from me, and none that were flattering." "I used to love Matas" are Hearn's pitiful words. It is with sorrow and pain that we note the sudden cessation in 1887 of the letters to Krehbiel. This noble friend had drawn from Hearn a beautiful world of play and enduring memories, and one may be more than sure that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed. Baker had been his most helpful and best friend, and yet for a fancied wrong Hearn wrote him a letter filled with insult and ruffianism which a gentleman could not answer, hardly forgive, and never forget. Did Hearn know anybody of character in the West Indies? To the greatest of American editors, the one who "discovered" him and introduced him to a national and international audience, who treated him with a sweet and gracious benignity, even after a shamelessness that is indescribable—to this good man there is not a published letter, although many, and many more, must exist. One day while at my house, Hearn rushed to his room, seized the man's picture on the wall, tore it in a hundred pieces, and danced and spat upon it in a furious rage. In subsequent letters to me he explained his hatred—how he broke his engagements, how he borrowed money from his loathed and insulted friend, how he got credit through him from his tailor, etc. Gently the abused one bore it all and without the least remonstrance, writing me, "Hearn has utterly cast me off; I was loath to part with him." Professor Chamberlain and others kindly explain the curious morbid psychology which Hearn had exhibited towards them. To the last, love and trust breathed from Hearn's letters to me, and yet I learn that to others long afterward he wrote of me with bitterness and malevolent injustice. And yet he had written me after I saw him for the last time, in this way: "Please don't write me at all, or expect me to write, for some months. I do not need any money. I have a good deal on my mind, and am apt, in consequence, to do very stupid or very unkind things in an unlucky moment." And then he wrote: "No, dear Gooley, I will never be indifferent to you! Never think that; I understand better than you suppose. If I am silent at intervals, never doubt me, dear teacher and brother; and you will find everything come right." How often is the pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving way to foolish, needless, and degrading inherited instincts at the expense of the higher life and usefulness! As to some who ludicrously boast of the long continuance of an intimate friendship, there are many letters of Hearn extant and unpublished which blow out that vanity with an amusing smile. The matter, generally, might not have so real an importance were it not that the publishing of literature has a vast deal to do with literature, and, closely examined, Hearn's quarrels with editors, publishers, and the public, is a matter that reaches out astonishingly both as regards himself, his books, and the interest in him, as well as beyond the question of Hearn or of any or all of his friends. Until one silent man consents to speak—which may never be—the discussion of the essence of the affair cannot be set forth in any detail. Passages in Hearn's letters relating thereto should never have been published, or a hundred other things should have been as frankly published. When such publicity shall exist the reasons will be manifest why one publisher destroyed an entire fresh edition of one book of Hearn, why another acted differently, why one is praised or praises himself, why others are blamed, why some are silent although a word would end the injustice, etc. One phase may be noted in passing:—Whatever Hearn's rights or wrongs as to the author's relations with publishers and editors, it was beyond the ken of his mind that one who may gloriously sacrifice all his own temporal blessings in striving after artistic excellence, has no right to ask the same altruism of those engaged in the publishing business. Hearn blamed the crude world, and, for him, its representatives in the persons of editors and their masters, the publishers, for wishing a certain kind of literature. As well blame the bookseller for not sending the book you had not ordered. He who deliberately chooses to give the world a literature he knows it does not want, must accept the rejection and editing of his manuscripts, and the absence of the world's cheques. He chose poverty and may not abuse them who allowed his choice to be realized. It is sad enough, but it is more than childish to grumble, more than ignoble to rail.