As we look at the decade of his life there, the notable thing now is the growth of his artistic, and still more of his intellectual, power. At first his imagination was captured by the strange, tropical, intoxicating beauty of the old Creole city, its social and ethnological contrasts, its mysterious underworld, and barbaric cults. He felt it to be his artistic duty, he writes, 'to be absorbed into this new life and study its form and color and passion.' Yet little more than a year later we find him in a mood of disillusion and of something resembling remorse. He writes to Mr. H. E. Krehbiel:—
'I am very weary of New Orleans. The first delightful impression it produced has vanished. The city of my dreams, bathed in the gold of eternal summer, and perfumed with amorous odours of orange flowers, has vanished like one of those phantom cities of South America swallowed up centuries ago by earthquakes, but reappearing at long intervals to delude travellers. What remains is something horrible, like the tombs here,—material and moral rottenness which no pen can do justice to. You must have read some of those mediæval legends in which the amorous youth finds the beautiful witch he has embraced all through the night crumble into a mass of calcined bones and ashes in the morning. Well, I feel like such a one, and almost regret that, unlike the victims of these diabolical illusions, I do not find my hair whitened and my lips withered by sudden age; for I enjoy exuberant vitality and still seem to myself like one buried alive or left alone in some city cursed with desolation like that described by Sinbad the sailor. No literary circle here; no jovial coterie of journalists; no associates save those vampire ones of which the less said the better. And the thought—Where must all this end?—may be laughed off in the daytime, but always returns to haunt me like a ghost in the night.'
Later, his advantageous connection with the 'Times-Democrat,' and his friendship with some of the most interesting and cultivated people of the city, made him happier in his residence there. From 1881, the date of the passage quoted, his preoccupation is more and more with books, and the things of the intellect and imagination, with 'the life of vanished cities and the pageantry of dead faiths,' less and less with 'vampire' associates. Yet still he purchases queer books, follows queer subjects, and 'pledges himself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous,' which, as he writes, 'suits my temperament.'
The chief literary expression of this impulse in its early phase was his 'Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures,' chiefly written before 1883, and published two years later. This, a series of reconstructions of what impressed him as most fantastically beautiful in the most exotic literature he was able to obtain, shows a remarkable growth in mere craftsmanship over his translations from Gautier. The cadences are surer, the weird or gorgeous pictures built up from simpler words, and the exotic atmosphere is more enveloping and persuasive.
But the handful of arabesques that Hearn brought together in his 'Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures' was only a drop in the bucket that came up brimming from that deep well of 'the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.' In the first five years of his work for the 'Times-Democrat,' he made and printed in the paper no fewer than two hundred translations of French stories and striking chapters or passages from the French books that engaged his eager attention. When we remember that the bulk of these versions were from the writings of the greatest contemporary masters of French prose,—thirty-one were from Maupassant,—we become aware of at least one of the sources of that extraordinary growth in Hearn's mastery of his instrument that can be seen when we compare the suave and luminous current of the prose of 'Some Chinese Ghosts' in 1887, with the volume from Gautier, or even with the 'Stray Leaves.'
It was at this time, too, that Hearn, forsaking translation for original work, began to follow the leading of his imagination into characteristic paths. The readers of the 'Times-Democrat,' largely, of course, of French descent, gave him a sympathetic public for a type of work that could perhaps have appeared in no other paper in America. He printed, even apparently with a certain réclame, curious, condensed, personalized paraphrases of out of the way books, like Perron's 'Femmes Arabes,' and other curious investigations of the Exotic, and passed easily from this into such excursions in aromatic impressionism as those that record his vacation in Florida, colored by his reading of Gaffarel's 'Floride Française,'[1] or his studies of the Creole life and language.
It is this group of papers, of special interest and significance to the student of Hearn,—themselves marked by the rich beginnings of his characteristic charm,—that have been selected to form the bulk of the present volume. Hearn himself at one time began to prepare for the press a collection of these papers, with the Floridian Reveries' as its initial section. Indeed, there is before me as I write a manuscript title-page done with those queer, curiously curving strokes of the pen, reading,—and bearing the striking motto from Delacroix that stands at the beginning of the present volume. Apparently it was Hearn's intention to add to the 'Floridian Reveries' a little collection of 'Fantastics,' with such savory titles as 'Aida,' 'The Devil's Carbuncle,' 'A Hemisphere in a Woman's Hair,' 'The Fool and Venus,' etc.
This group, however, is, unfortunately, lost. From the notebook labeled upon its cover 'Fantastics' many leaves have been cut, and there remains only the paper on 'Arabian Women,' which appears hereafter. The Creole papers have been selected from the vast number of essays that Hearn wrote upon this subject, as showing best, perhaps, the peculiar direction of his interests. Taken as a whole, the material here offered to the reader marks the end of Hearn's first literary period, the period of translation and paraphrase, of 'literary journalism.'
The year 1883, as readers of his letters know, marked an epoch in Hearn's intellectual life. Then for the first time he read Herbert Spencer, and by a singular paradox conceived a passionate adoration for that passionless philosopher who, we may think, had the peculiar advantage of knowing so much about the Unknowable.' The secret of the paradox seems to have been that Spencer's vast synthetic panorama of the universe, outer and inner, was precisely the kind of vision to attract Hearn's gypsy intellect, so long bewildered by the 'pageantry of dead faiths,' so long obsessed by the incommunicable sorrow of the world, yet pledged to the quest of 'the absolute' by the forces of his Celtic and Hellenic ancestry. At any rate the philosophy of Spencer came to him with something of the power and unction of an evangelical religion, bringing with it not only conversion, but conviction of sin,' and 'regeneration.' From this time on, there was a new seriousness in his life and a new gravity in his work. Henceforth he was concerned about the Exotic and Monstrous chiefly as they could be employed as parables of the gospel according to Herbert Spencer.
A year or two later there came into his work another strain that was to remain potent,—the tropical. As early as 1879 he had felt the spell, and had written: 'So I draw my chair to the fire, light my pipe de terre Gambièse, and in the flickering glow weave fancies of palm trees and ghostly reefs and tepid winds, and a Voice from the far tropics calls to me across the darkness.'