In 1884 he made the visit to Grande Isle in the Mexican Gulf that resulted in his 'Chita,' which is still in many respects his most astonishing tour de force in word-painting, though in it we see how far away he was from the English tradition of creative art in fiction. The only logic in the harrowing conclusion is the emotional logic of a temperament immitigably macabresque, that must make a tale of terror intensify in poignancy to the end.
In 1887, he went to the French West Indies, and found there a theme perhaps more in consonance with the full richness of his vein than any he afterwards encountered. In 'Youma,' his West Indian novelette, the note is certainly falsetto, but in his 'Two Years in the French West Indies' the luxuriant leafiness of his style, heavy with tropical perfumes, subtly interpenetrated with the sense of tropical terror, rarely goes beyond the bounds of faithful depiction. And underneath it all we begin to see that impressive Spencerian perception of the fatal unity of the world.
In June, 1888, Hearn landed in New York, but drunken as he was with tropic light, he was troubled by the canyoned streets, and returned to Martinique by the same boat that had brought him. In the following year he was in Philadelphia, preparing his West Indian books for the press. At this time he suddenly conceived a passionate and characteristic interest in Japan from reading Mr. Percival Lowell's 'The Soul of the Far East.' His correspondence is full of it. 'How luminous,' he exclaims, 'how psychically electric!' It was with boundless delight and with the highest hopes that he welcomed a suggestion that he should go to Japan to prepare a series of articles upon that country.
As one who reads Hearn's writings chronologically passes from the West Indian books to the Japanese, there is evident a remarkable change, not only of atmosphere but of tone, and, despite the continuity of the Spencerian preoccupation, of what we may perhaps call 'soul.' The tropical luxuriance of his earlier manner has been replaced by quieter tints and subtler cadences, and henceforth he gives free rein to his faculty only in rare heightened passages, which rise above the narrow, quiet stream of his habitual prose with an effect incomparably telling. In part this was the result of his sensitive perception of the peculiar color of Japanese landscape, a domesticated Nature, which loves man, and makes itself beautiful in a quiet gray-and-blue way like the Japanese women'; which must in consequence be reproduced in water-color rather than in the oils in which he had been working. In part it was the result of his greater maturity, and that assured control over his medium, which left him no impulse to mere virtuosity. But still more, one thinks as one reads the letters, it was the result of happier and more normal conditions of life. As a professor of English literature, he had something approaching a secure social and economic position. As the friend of men like Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, and Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, some of his oddities were neutralized. (He felt always more of a man, he said, after contact with their reality, 'like Antæus, who got stronger every time his feet touched the solid ground.') As the father of three boys and the head of a Japanese household of eleven persons, he had for the first time a stake in the world. And finally in what was clearly a marriage of almost miraculous suitability for him, his restless spirit found a measure of peace.
[1] It was a happy coincidence which, within a week of the search in the Boston Public Library that revealed the literary sources of these writings, brought me from Japan, the gift of Mrs. Hearn, this very book from Hearn's own collection of works dealing with the Odd, the Queer, etc.
II
Lafcadio Hearn has been called a 'decadent'; the word does not signify, but if by it is meant, as sometimes seems to be, a humanist without physique, there is a considerable measure of truth in its application. If one symptom of decadence be the love of words for their own sake, it was, as we have seen, not lacking in his earlier work. There is, however, nothing more unjust to most human beings then the application to them of tags that have taken their color from trite literary usage and hasty popular association with a few notorious characters. This is especially true in Hearn's case. In 1885 he wrote to W. D. O'Connor: 'If my little scraggy hand tells you anything, you ought to recognize in it a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous disposition,—almost your antitype in everything except the love of the beautiful.' The advocatus diaboli himself could scarcely have done better. Erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous, Hearn undoubtedly was; and these qualities, enhanced as they were by self-pity, so far from being what the psychologists call 'independent variables,' were of the very essence of his faculty. 'Unless,' he writes, 'somebody does or says something horribly mean to me I can't do certain kinds of work'; and again: 'I have found that the possessor of pure horse-health never seems to have an idea of the "half-lights." It is impossible to see the psychical undercurrents of human existence without that self-separation from the purely physical part of being that severe sickness gives like a revelation.'
For all his fine Byronic swimming of straits and wide bays Hearn was never the possessor of 'pure horse-health,' and it is pretty clear that to his lack of it, to his trembling sense of the hard attrition of the world, we owe his marvelous mastery of the 'half-light.' Yet this was not so much 'morbidness' in our English sense, as morbidezza, the quality of mellow-tinted color and soft harmonies. Late in life he wrote, 'I like Kipling's morbidness, which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the truth of God and Hell and Nature,—but the other—no!' Of 'the other' there is little trace in his own latest work.
The chief morbid factor in Hearn's physical constitution was his vision. One eye was totally blind, the other had, it is said, but one twentieth of normal vision; but too much has been made of this as a qualification of his genius. His monocular vision gave him, of course, landscape 'flat,' without perspective and depth; but undoubtedly, like the half-closed eye of the painter, it gave him color in wonderful harmonious intensity, and who shall say that it was with a vividness beyond Nature? The tremendous cumulative rhapsody of blue at the beginning of his 'Two Years in the French West Indies' is said by those who best know the Southern seas not to exceed reality. And there is plenty of evidence that in his quick, comprehending glances through the single eyeglass that he habitually carried, he seized minute significant details of persons or objects which others missed. It has been said by one who should be qualified to know, that he saw his world as partially and obscurely as one who looks through the large end of an opera-glass; but the analogy is imperfect unless we remember that objects so seen are given not only with remoteness, but with rich color, and with a curious artistic composition like a Claude in miniature.
But after all it was the lens in the brain that counted with Hearn. As opposed to his vision, his visionary faculty was of the first order. From boyhood, 'ghostly' was his characteristic, as it finally came to be almost his trick word. He envisaged wraiths and vanished cities with a definition more like that of objective than of subjective sight. Only his skeptical intelligence kept him from being a thoroughgoing spirit-seer. Perhaps his most characteristic mood was that reflected in his impressive essay on 'Dust' in 'Gleanings from Buddha Fields'—'I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being haunted,—haunted by the prodigious luminous spectre of the world.'