All that Mr. Tinker says of him may be true, but it is not a picture of Lafcadio Hearn as he really was, or as the letters published by Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore discover him, or as Reminiscences by his widow show him to be. He was hybrid, he was oversexed, he had paranoiac trends, he was pathologically sensitive and morbidly timid, he was deformed facially and possibly morally, and he saw neither far nor straight. What has all that to do with Lafcadio Hearn, an asset of literature? He wrote like a god and he made angelic music. Chita, Kokoro, The Nun of the Temple of Amida, attest it. He was a critic in the class of Rémy de Gourmont. He was a translator that Mrs. Constance Garnett would call master. He had a flair for beauty of literary style keener than any one since Pater. He could not judge men and he could not discriminate between women; he had no colour sense, and his olfactory sense was abnormal; he had greater compassion for turtles and toads than he had for Jesuits and Jews; but he rarely hurt any one’s feelings save those of Mr. Alden. That grand old mediator of writers’ thoughts and reflections said, “Father, forgive him, he neither knows the nature of his act, nor the enormity of the offence, for he is a genius.” He may not have been “cultured” to a twisted mind like that possessed by Dr. George M. Gould, but Goethe would have thought him cultured, for he was a poet; and George Moore would have made an affirmation to that effect for, like himself, Hearn was a story-teller; Aristippus would not have denied him, for he too was a hedonist, and Anatole France would have proclaimed him, for they both held that beauty was the touchstone for worth.
Judged by his contribution to literature, he was a man of culture and he had illumination and understanding.
I can understand that it interests physicians, especially psychiatrists, to investigate the ancestry and study the conduct of men who agitated the waters of their time; but I cannot understand what bearing heritage or behaviour has on the contribution of these men to literature. How does it concern the seeker of emotional solace or intellectual sustenance to know that Poe and Verlaine were drunkards, that Rimbaud and Baudelaire were inverted genesically; that Hearn’s father was an Irish rake devoid of parental responsibility, his mother an Ionian of composite ancestry profoundly psychopathic who married a Jew?
Mr. Tinker says, “Hearn’s peculiarities and mental affinities were entirely the result of idiosyncrasies of ancestry and youthful environment.” Well, is Hearn any different in that respect from the whole world? Does Mr. Tinker aim to do what Mr. White recently attempted to do for Woodrow Wilson: allot his cardiac virtues to the Wilsons and his cerebral gifts to the Woodrows? I suppose he would attribute his bulimia and illassible sexual cravings to Charles Bush Hearn; his tenderness for cats and his desire to create beauty to Rosa Tessima; his Jesuit phobia to the strain of English blood; his penchant for gastronomies to the Turk strain; his Wanderlust to an ancestral Arab; his passion for personal cleanliness to a gipsy forebear who had learned that there are few more pleasant experiences than those of bathing; his pride to a remote Moor; but his sensitiveness came from his wall eye—all his friends say that.
Mr. Tinker thinks “his warring inherited instincts were to have a large part in moulding his life, for they made of his soul a battleground. Frank Oriental sensuousness was shamed, but not curbed, by Anglo-Saxon self-control. Gallic expansiveness tried to break through Arab impassivity, and all the while, Gipsy lure of the road and love of new location lashed his life to restlessness; in short, what one set of inherited impulses bade him do, another inhibited, until all constructive action was paralysed.”
Lafcadio Hearn’s soul as it has been revealed to me from a long intimacy with his writings is not my idea of a battleground. Undoubtedly his instincts had much to do with shaping his life. They have in shaping the life of any one who amounts to something. Lafcadio Hearn had a very high sex coefficient and he did not bend the knee to church and convention. Well, there are others, and I fancy they would deny that their souls are battlegrounds. And this paralysis of constructive action, how does that show itself? Certainly not in New Orleans, more certainly not in Japan. Perhaps in Martinique? The heat and the atmosphere there make for lassitude that is tantamount to paralysis. We are perhaps on safer ground in attributing it to them than to warring impulses. I need scarcely add that I do not admit Hearn’s “paralysis of constructive action.”
Mr. Tinker’s book is a wrong picture of Lafcadio Hearn, but it is not the author’s fault. It is Hearn’s fault. He should not have philandered with Althea Foley; he should have spurned Dr. Gould’s advances; and knowing Denny Corcoran’s record he should have avoided him; and we can never forgive him for not wearing “stylebuilt” clothes. Had he done so he would not have had Krehbiel’s door slammed in his face, nor would the great musical critic have had occasion to write the letter, Cæsarean in brevity and Nelsonian in construction: “Dear Hearn, you can go to Japan, or you can go to Hell.”
Suppose Mr. Tinker were to get drunk and stay so more or less for a week, and that I should shadow him with camera and notebook. Does any one think that my record of his conduct and my picture of him would be correct or adequate? I do not. It might do him a great injustice.
However, much should be forgiven a biographer who makes such searching criticism as: Hearn’s constant vigilance to suppress finally came to inhibit his creative power. This explains the carefully wrought artificiality—the tenuousness of subject matter, but the exquisite finish of form—which is characteristic of all his books. The truth is he was forced to spin gossamer out of hemp when he could have made it into strong rope.