XIII
THE CULT OF THE NUANCE LAFCADIO HEARN
Lafcadio Hearn, shy, complex, sensuous, has in Elizabeth Bisland a sympathetic biographer. In her two volumes, the major portion is devoted to the letters of this exotic and extraordinary writer; he was both, without being either a great man or a great artist. The dominant impression made by his personality, so much and often so unhappily discussed, is itself impressionistic. Curiously enough, as he viewed the world, so has he been judged by the world. His life, fragmentary, episodic, restless, doubtless the result of physical and psychical limitations, is admirably reflected in his writings with their staccato phrasing, overcoloured style, their flight from anything approaching reality, their uneasy apprehension of sex, and their flittings among the folk-lore of a half dozen extinct civilisations. His defective eyesight was largely the cause of his attitude toward life and art—for with our eyes we create our world—and his intense sufferings and consequent pessimism must be set down to the inevitable tragedy of a soul that greatly aspired, but a soul that had the interior vision though not the instrument with which to interpret it. Lafcadio Hearn was a poetic temperament, a stylist, but an incomplete artist.
His biographer, Miss Bisland, speaks of him as a "stylist." Unfortunately this is not far from the truth; he was a "stylist," though not always with an individual style. The real Hearn had superimposed upon him the débris of many writers, usually Frenchmen. He began his literary life as a worshipper and translator of Théophile Gautier and died in the faith that Pierre Loti had said the last word of modern prose. Gautier attracted him by his sumptuousness of epithet, the perfectly realised material splendours of gold, of marble, of colour. To the neurasthenic Hearn, his brain big with glorious dreams, the Parisian pagan must have seemed godlike in his half-smiling, half-contemptuous mastery of language, a mastery in its ease not outrivalled even by Flaubert. Gautier was a gigantic reflector of the visible world, but without genuine sympathy for humanity, and he boasted that his periods, like cats, always fell on their feet, no matter how high or carelessly he tossed them. And then he was Greek in his temperament, Greek grafted upon a Parisian who loved form and hue above all else, and this appealed to Hearn, whose mother was Greek, whose tastes were exotic. It was only after he had passed the half-century mark and when he was the father of three sons that some apprehension of the gravity of Occidental ethical teaching was realised by him.
When M. Loti-Viaud, that most exquisite of French prose artists and sentimental sensualists, made his appearance, Lafcadio was ravished into the seventh heaven. Here was what he had sought to do, what he never would do—the perfection of impressionism, created by an accumulation of delicate details, unerringly presented, with the intention of attacking the visual (literary) sense, not the ear. You can't read a page of Loti aloud; hearing is never the final court of appeal for him. Nor is the ear regarded in Hearn's prose. He is not "auditive"; like Loti and the Goncourts, he writes for the eye. Fr. Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the prédominance des sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the dash—he must have studied Poe not too wisely—infinitesimal strokes of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of architectonic and the fatal lack of variety, surprise, or grandeur in the harmonic sense, these disbar the prose of Lafcadio Hearn from the exalted position claimed for it by his admirers.
Yet it is a delicate prose; the haunted twilight of the soul has found its notations in his work. With Amiel he could say of a landscape that it was a state of soul. His very defects became his strength. With normal eyesight we should not have had the man of ghostly reveries, the patient, charming etcher on a miniature block of evanescent prose, the forger of tiny chords, modulating into Chopin-like mist. His mania for the word caused him to neglect the sentence; his devotion to the sentence closed for him any comprehensive handling of the paragraph; he seldom wrote a perfect page; never an entire chapter or book. At his best he equals Loti in his evocation of the mystery that encompasses us, a mystery that has been sounded in music, seldom in language. His cast of mind was essentially romantic. Hearn does not mention the name of Goncourt in his letters, and yet it is a certain side of the brothers, the impressionistic side, that his writings resemble. But he had not their artistry. Nor could he, like Maupassant, summon tangible spirits from the vasty deep, as did the Norman master in Le Horla. When Rodin was told by Arthur Symons that William Blake saw visions, the sculptor, after looking at the drawings, replied: "Yes, he saw them once; he should have seen them three or four times." Hearn seldom pinned down to the paper his dreams, though he had a gift of suggestion, of spiritual overtones, in a key of transcendentalism, that, in certain pages, far outshines Loti or Maupassant. Disciple of Herbert Spencer—he was forced because of his feminine fluidity to lean on a strong, positive brain—hater of social conventions, despiser of Christianity, a proselyte to a dozen creeds, from the black magic of Voodooism to Japanese Shintoism, he never quite rid himself of the spiritual deposits inherited from his Christian ancestry. This strain, this contradiction, to be found in his later letters, explains much of his psychology, all of his art. A man after nearly two thousand years of Christianity may say to himself: "Lo! I am a pagan." But all the horses from Dan to Beersheba cannot drag him back to paganism, cannot make him resist the "pull" of his hereditary faith. The very quality Hearn most deplored in himself gives his work an exotic savour; he is a Christian of Greek and Roman Catholic training, a half Greek, half Celt, whole gipsy, masquerading as an Oriental. The mask is an agreeable one, the voice of the speaker sweet, almost enticing, but one more mask it is, and therefore not the real Hearn. He was Goth, not Greek; he suffered from the mystic fear of the Goth, while he yearned for the great day flame of the classics. Even his Japonisme was skin-deep.
Miss Bisland relates the uneventful career of Hearn in an unaffected manner. He was loved by his friends, while he often ran away from them. Solitary, eccentric, Hearn was an unhappy man. He was born June 27, 1850, on one of the Ionian Isles, Santa Maura, called in modern Greek, Leokus, or Lafcada, the Sappho Leucadia, promontory and all. His father was Charles Bush Hearn, of an old Dorsetshire family—Hearn, however, is a Romany name—and an Irishman. His mother was Rosa Cerigote, a Greek, whose brothers, it is said, stabbed their sister's suitor, but she, Isolde-like, nursed him, and he married her. The marriage was not a happy one. Young Lafcadio drifted to Ireland, was adopted by a rich aunt of Doctor Hearn's, a Mrs. Brenane, and went with her to Wales. He is said to have been educated in the north of France at a Jesuit college. He learned the language there. Later he was at Ushan, the Roman Catholic college of Durham. His life long he hated this religion, hated it in a superstitious fashion, and seemed to have suffered from a sort of persecution mania—he fancied Jesuits were plotting against him. At school he lost the sight of one eye through an accident while at play. In 1869 Hearn was five feet three inches tall, weighed one hundred and thirty-seven pounds, and had a chest measurement of thirty-six and three-fourths inches. Disappointed of an expected inheritance—his grandaunt left him nothing—he went to London with his head full of dreams, but his pockets were empty. In 1869 he landed in New York, penniless, poor in health, half blind, friendless, and very ambitious.
In this biography you may follow him through the black and coiling poverty, a mean and bitter life compared with which the career of Robert Louis Stevenson was the triumphal procession of a Prince Charming of letters. He landed finally in Cincinnati, where he secured an unimportant position on The Enquirer. His friends at that time were H. E. Krehbiel, Joseph Tunison, and H. F. Farney, the artist. His letters, printed in this volume, and ranging from 1877 to 1889, addressed to Mr. Krehbiel, are the most interesting for the students of Hearn the literary aspirant. He envies the solid architecture of that music-critic's prose, but realises that it is not for him—lack of structure is his chief deficiency. But he passionately admired that quality in others wherein he felt himself wanting. He was generous to others, not to himself. It is unfortunate that he studied the prose of the seventeenth century. Mr. Krehbiel evidently knew of his tone-deafness. Hearn wrote him that he could listen to Patti after he had read Krehbiel. This proves him to be of the "literary" type of music lover; music must first be a picture before it makes a tonal image in the cortical cells. The most remarkable thing in the Hearn case is his intensity of vision without adequate optical organs. With infinite pains he pictured life microscopically. He was for ever excited, his brain clamouring for food, starving for the substance denied it by lack of normal eyesight. Hearn sickened of newspaper work, he loathed it, he often declared, and slipped away to New Orleans. There he found much material for his exotic cravings. He accumulated an expensive and curious library, for his was the type of talent that must derive from art, not life. At Martinique we find him hypnotised by the scenery, the climate, and the colourful life. He abhorred the cold, he always shivered in New York, and this tepid, romantic island, with its dreamy days and starry nights, filled him with languid joy. But he soon discovered that the making of literature was not possible in such a luxurious atmosphere, as he did later in Japan, and he returned to the United States. In 1890 he left for the East, never to return. He died at Tokio, September 26, 1904.
Hearn had an amazing acquaintance with the folk-lore of many nations. He was perpetually raving over the Finnish, the Voodoo, the Hindu. If he had gone to Paris instead of to Japan, we should have missed the impressionism of his Japanese tales, yet he might have found the artistic solace his aching heart desired. There his style would have been better grounded; there he would have found solid weapons fashioned for his ethnical, archæological, and æsthetical excursions. Folk-lore is a treacherous byway of literature, and Hearn always worked in it with old-fashioned tools. As versatile in range as were his researches, the results are meagre, for he was not a trained observer nor thinker in any domain. So is it that in his later rovings among the metaphysics of Spencer and modern thought there is something feverishly shallow. His judgments of English writers were amateurish. He called Kipling a great poet, presumably on the strength of his exotic tang. Sir Edwin Arnold he rated above Matthew Arnold for the same reason.
In Japan, delicious, malodorous Japan, we leave him to the reader, who will find in these letters to Henry Edward Krehbiel, Ball, W. D. O'Connor, Gould, Elizabeth Bisland, Page M. Butler, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Ellwood Hendrick, and Mitchell McDonald the most entertaining, self-revealing literary correspondence published since the death of Robert Louis Stevenson. He interpreted the soul of old Japan at the critical moment when a new Western one was being assumed like a formidable carapace. He also warned us of Japan, the new Japan—though not in a friendly way; he would have been glad to see Western civilisation submerged by the yellow races.