Letters from the Raven: Correspondence of L. Hearn with Henry Watkin

by Lafcadio Hearn

"Since first I beheld you, Adele,
While dancing the calinda,
I have remained faithful to the thought of you;
My freedom has departed from me,
I care no longer for all other negresses;
I have no heart left for them;—
You have such grace and cunning:—
You are like the Congo serpent.
"I love you too much, my beautiful one:—
I am not able to help it.
My heart has become just like a grasshopper,—
It does nothing but leap.
I have never met any woman
Who has so beautiful a form as yours.
Your eyes flash flame;
Your body has enchained me captive.
"Ah, you are so like the serpent-of-the-rattles
Who knows how to charm the little bird,
And who has a mouth ever ready for it
Yo serve it for a tomb.
I have never known any negress
Who could walk with such grace as you can.
Or who could make such beautiful gestures;
Your body is a beautiful doll.
"When I cannot see you, Adele,
I feel myself ready to die;
My life becomes like a candle
Which has almost burned itself out.
I cannot then find anything in the world
Which is able to give me pleasure:—
I could well go down to the river
And throw myself in it that I might cease to suffer.
Tell me if you have a man,
And I will make an ouanga charm for him:
I will make him turn into a phantom,
If you will only take me for your husband.
I will not go to see you when you are cross;
Other women are mere trash to me;
I will make you very happy
And I will give you a beautiful Madras handkerchief."

He freely admitted that the poem was untranslatable, that it lost its weird beauty, its melody, its liquid softness, its languor, when put into English. Then came a characteristic bit in which he displayed the man who dwelt with delight upon the inner meaning of words,—the delight felt only by the artist in language: "I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia? The French have a beautiful verb expressive of this idea,—serpenter, 'to serpent,' to curve in changing undulations like a lithe snake. The French artist speaks of the outlines of a beautiful human body as serpenting,' curving and winding like a serpent. Do you not like the word? I think it is so expressive of flowinglines of elegance,—so full of that mystery of grace which puzzled Solomon: 'the way of a serpent upon a rock.'"

On January 7, 1878, came a picture in prose, which now reminds us of William Ernest Henley's "London Voluntary," in which the latter described the splendor of a golden October day in the metropolis of the world. Here is Christmas Eve in New Orleans: "Christmas Eve came in with a blaze of orange glory in the west, and masses of lemon-colored clouds piled up above the sunset. The whole city was filled with orange-colored light, just before the sun went down; and between the lemon-hued clouds and the blue were faint tints of green. The colors of that sunset seemed a fairy mockery of the colors of the fruit booths throughout the city; where the golden fruit lay piled up in luxuriant heaps, and where the awnings of white canvas had been replaced by long archways of interwoven orange branches with the fruit still glowing upon them. It was an Orange Christmas."

Then at nightfall he passed the French opera house on Bourbon Street. It was "dark and dead and silent," and as a matter of course the dreamer had another vision: "Sometimes, when passing under the sharply cut shadows of the building in a night of tropical moonlight, I fancy that a shadowy performance of 'Don Giovanni' or 'Masaniello' must be going on within for the entertainment of a ghostly audience; and that if somebody would but open the doors an instant, one might catch a glimpse of spectral splendor, of dusky-eyed beauties long dead,—of forgotten faces pale with the sleep of battlefields,—of silks that should be mouldering in mouldering chests with the fashions of twenty years ago."

And finally this letter contained the following prophetic utterance concerning the new South,—the South then not yet in existence, the South that so nearly approximates what Hearn said it would be: "It is the picturesqueness of the South, the poetry, the traditions, the legends, the superstitions, the quaint faiths, the family prides, the luxuriousness, the splendid indolence and the splendid sins of the old social system which have passed, or which are now passing, away forever.... The new South may, perhaps, become far richer than the old South; but there will be no aristocracy, no lives of unbridled luxury, no reckless splendors of hospitality, no mad pursuit of costliest pleasures. The old hospitality has been starved to death, and leaves no trace of its former being save the thin ghost of a romance. The new South will be less magnificent, though wealthier; less generous, though more self-denying; less poetical, though more cultured. The new cities will be, probably, more prosperous and less picturesque than the old."

January 14,1878, Hearn devoted his entire letter to W. C. C. Claiborne, the first American governor of Louisiana. He told in what hostile manner the American was received by the haughty Creole gentry, and how he was alleged to have worn his hat at the theatre. It is in the comment on this that Hearn most amusingly displays himself as an Englishman, with the dim-seeing eyes of a Dickens or a saucy Kipling rather than the clear-headed, clear-eyed American, or the adopted citizen, understanding this country and its people: "I fancy that wearing of the hat before those terribly cultivated and excruciatingly courteous Creole audiences must have been at first a mere oversight; but that poor Claiborne naturally got stubborn when such an outcry was raised about it and, with an angry pride of manhood peculiar to good American blood, swore 'by the Eternal' that he would wear his hat wherever he pleased. Don't you almost wish you could slap him on the shoulder with that truly American slap of approbation?" Of course that is pure Dickens, the Dickens of "American Notes," just as is the following rather amusing description of American newspapers in the good years 1804, 1805, and 1806: "In those days the newspaper seems to have been neither more nor less than a public spittoon,—every man flung his quid of private opinion into it."

Hearn went to look at the Claiborne graves in the old St. Louis cemetery on Basin Street. Throughout his life graveyards seemed to have a fascination for him; but the following description of the St. Louis cemetery is interesting because it proves, what has often been denied, that part of Hearn's boyhood was spent in Wales: "This cemetery is one of the most curious, and at the same time one of the most dilapidated, in the world. I have seen old graveyards in the north of England, and tombs in Wales, where names of the dead of three hundred years ago may yet be read upon the mossy stones; but I have never seen so grim a necropolis as the ruined Creole cemetery at New Orleans. There is no order there, no regularity, no long piles of white obelisks, no even ranks of grey tablets. The tombs seem to jostle one another; the graveyard is a labyrinth in which one may easily lose oneself. Some of the tombs are Roman in size and design; some are mere heaps of broken brick; some are of the old-fashioned table form."

Readers of Hearn's books are familiar with those pages in which he speaks of Japanese female names, and studies appellations in general. This fancy was no new thing with him. As long ago as February 18, 1878, he studied the curious nomenclature of New Orleans streets, revealing, as it does, part of the history of the city, something of its old gallant life, something of its old classical culture. He told how Burgundy Street was named after the great duke; Dauphine is, of course, self-explanatory, as are Louis XV and Royal and Bourbon. Governors are represented by Carondelet, Galvez, and others; French and Spanish piety, by such names as St. Bartholomy, St. Charles, and Annunciata. The classicism, which so affected the traditions of French poetry and the French stage, is here represented by-streets named Calliope, Clio, Dryades, &c. Gallantry, "often wicked gallantry, I fear," is commemorated by a number of streets christened with "the sweetest and prettiest feminine names imaginable,—Adele, Celeste, Suzette, and Annette."

Then he gave his readers some more of those Creole songs he was always collecting, some of which as rich treasure he was afterwards to give to his friend, Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, the musical critic. In this letter he told how, when for the first time he read Daudet's novel, translated under the title of "Sidonie," he was charmed with the refrain of a Creole song, and determined, when in New Orleans, to procure the whole poem. He recorded his disappointment in being able only to get one stanza, which he translated as follows:

"Others say it is your happiness;
I say, it is your sorrow:
When we are enchanted by love,
Farewell to all happiness!
Poor little Miss Zizi!
Poor little Miss Zizi!
Poor little Miss Zizi!
She has sorrow, sorrow, sorrow;—
She has sorrow in her heart!"