Here is another bit, which seems to the Anglo-Saxon very uncouth and unpoetical when given in bare, bald English, robbed of the oft-lisping Creole melody:
"If thou wert a little bird,
And I were a little gun,
I would shoot thee—bang!
Ah, dear little
Mahogany jewel,
I love thee as a little pig loves the mud?'
The next is more charming. It is only a snatch, but it hints delicious romance:
"Delaide, my queen, the way is too long for me to travel;—
That way leads far up yonder.
But, little as I am, I am going to stem the stream up there.
'I, Liron, am come,' is what I shall say to them.
'My queen, good night; 'tis I, Liron, who have come.'"
And finally there is this one, evidently of negro origin, made to ridicule a mulatto girl named Toucouton, who tried to pass as white:
"Ah, Toucouton!
I know you well:
You are like a blackamoor;
There is no soap
Which is white enough
To wash your skin.
"When the white folks give a ball,
You are not able to go there;
Ah, how will you be able to play the flirt!
You who so love to shine?
Ah, Toucouton, &c.
"Once you used to take a seat
Among the fashionable people;
Now you must take leave, decamps
Without any delay whatever.
Ah, Toucouton," &c.
We have seen that all these letters by Hearn were as if written for his own pleasure or for the pleasure of a friend, but decidedly not for a newspaper clientèle. After the "news" just referred to, there followed two letters which would seem to indicate that the patient editor besought his correspondent to come nearer to hard, prosaic news matters and treat of the turmoil of Louisiana state affairs. Accordingly, on March 24, 1878, there was a screed on of "Louisiana as It Is," treating of the political questions, and finally another, on March 31, scouting the possibility of forming a Hayes party in Louisiana. These letters were written in so half-hearted a way that it was not at all surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by a new and more ordinary name. Hearn was no longer the representative of the paper. He went on record to the effect that he quit because the paper was slow about paying him money, although he demanded the arrears time and time again. The chances are that the Commercial's readers stupidly wanted more about politics and less about Creole love poetry. With the close of this correspondence Hearn thus definitely closed all connexion with the Cincinnati newspaper world.
We have seen now, from the Midwinter letters, how the Hearn of New Orleans was the father of the Hearn of the West Indies and of Japan. Indeed, so far as his work was concerned, the same subjects interested him throughout his life. This is not to say that he remained at a standstill. On the contrary, he was constantly growing. Despite his bad eyesight, he read incessantly, and his reading took a very wide range. He labored to perfect his style. He struggled with words; he used the file after a fashion to remind one of what Flaubert and Stevenson have told us of themselves. But with a very wise knowledge of his own sympathies and limitations, he chose exactly the topics for his pen that could most surely stir his imagination. It is a little singular, some seven years after his letters to the Cincinnati newspaper, to find him writing practically the same kind of articles and on the same subjects for Harper's Weekly. Hearn, then at the age of thirty-five, anxious to have his things appear in some publication with a circulation other than purely local, and anxious likewise to eke out his slender income, managed to secure a commission from the house of Harper. The firm had sent a staff artist to New Orleans to draw sketches of the exposition of 1885. Hearn was to supply the descriptive articles. His first appeared in Harper's Weekly of January 3, 1885, and was a straightforward account of the exposition. Of course with a man of Hearn's temperament this could not last long, so it is not surprising to see the next letter, which appeared on January 10, 1885, devoted to "The Creole Patois."
"Although," he writes, "the pure Creole element is disappearing from the 'Vie Faubon,' as Creole children call the antiquated part of New Orleans, it is there, nevertheless, that the patois survives as a current idiom; it is there one must dwell to hear it spoken in its purity and to study its peculiarities of intonation and construction. The patois-speaking inhabitants, dwelling mostly in those portions of the quadrilateral furthest from the river and from the broad American boundary of Canal Street,—which many of them never cross when they can help it,—are not less bizarre than the architectural background of their picturesque existence. The visitor is surrounded by a life motley-colored as those fantastic populations described in the Story of the Young King of the Black Isles; the African ebon is least visible, but of bronze browns, banana yellows, orange golds, there are endless varieties, paling off into faint lemon tints and even dead silver whites. The paler the shade, the more strongly do Latin characteristics show themselves; and the oval faces, with slender cheeks and low, broad brows, prevail. Sometimes in the yellower types a curious Sphinx visage appears, dreamy as Egypt. Occasionally also one may encounter figures so lithe, so animal, as to recall the savage grace of Piou's 'Satyress.' For the true colorist the contrast of a light saffron skin with dead black hair and eyes of liquid jet has a novel charm, as of those descriptions in the Malay poem, Bida-sari,' of 'women like statues of gold.' It is hard to persuade oneself that such types do not belong to one distinct race, the remnant of some ancient island tribe, and the sound of their richly vowelled Creole speech might prolong the pleasant illusion."
Happening to mention an ocoroon, the very term starts him on a rhapsody: