"That word reminds one of a celebrated and vanished type,—never mirrored upon canvas, yet not less physically worthy of artistic preservation than those amber-tinted beauties glorified in the Oriental studies of Ingres, of Richter, of Gérôme! Uncommonly tall were those famous beauties, citrine-hued, elegant of stature as palmettoes, lithe as serpents; never again will such types reappear upon American soil. Daughters of luxury, artificial human growths, never organized to enter the iron struggle for life unassisted and unprotected, they vanished forever with the social system which made them a place apart as for splendid plants reared within a conservatory. With the fall of American feudalism the dainty glass house was dashed to pieces; the species it contained have perished utterly; and whatever morality may have gained, one cannot help thinking that art has lost something by their extinction. What figures for designs in bronze! What tints for canvas!"
Then Hearn returns to the subject of the Creoles, and speaks of the compilation of Creole proverbs of the Antilles and other places, but of the lack of a similar work in Louisiana. It foreshadowed his own "Ghombo Zhebes," then in the making. Reading his description of the fugitive Creole literature, one regrets that Hearn did not find time and opportunity to collect: it as he did the proverbs.
"The inedited Creole literature," says he, "comprised songs, satires in rhyme, proverbs, fairy tales,—almost everything commonly included under the term of folk-lore. The lyrical portion of it is opulent in oddities, in melancholy beauties; Alphonse Daudet has frequently borrowed therefrom, using Creole refrains in his novels with admirable effect. Some of the popular songs possess a unique and almost weird pathos; there is a strange, naïve sorrow in their burdens, as of children sobbing for lonesomeness in the night. Others, on the contrary, are inimitably comical. There are many ditties or ballads devoted to episodes of old plantation life, to surreptitious frolic, to description of singular industries and callings, to commemoration of events which had strongly impressed the vivid imagination of negroes,—a circus show, an unexpected holiday, the visit of a beautiful stranger to the planter's home, or even some one of those incidents indelibly marked with a crimson spatter upon the fierce history of Louisiana politics."
On January 17, under the same caption, Hearn continued the subject, giving some of the songs and speaking of their probable African ancestry.
On January 31, once more under the general title of "The New Orleans Exposition," Hearn turns with avidity to musings on the Japanese exhibit. Right in the beginning we have this on art, remarkable, as so much of Hearn's work was, for a vivid sense of color and form despite his own difficulty in seeing: "What Japanese art of the best era is unrivalled in—that characteristic in which, according even to the confession of the best French art connoisseurs, it excels all other art—is movement, the rhythm, the poetry of visible motion. Great masters of the antique Japanese schools have been known to devote a whole lifetime to the depiction of one kind of bird, one variety of insect or reptile, alone. This specialization of art, as Ary Renan admirably showed us in a recent essay, produced results that no European master has ever been able to approach. A flight of gulls sweeping through the gold light of a summer morning; a long line of cranes sailing against a vermilion sky; a swallow twirling its kite shape against the disk of the sun; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hoverings of moths or splendid butterflies,—these are subjects the Japanese brush has rendered with a sublimity of realism which might be imitated, perhaps, but never surpassed. Except in the statues of gods or goddesses (Buddhas which almost compel the Christian to share the religious awe of their worshippers, or those charming virgins of the Japanese heaven, 'slenderly supple as a beautiful lily'), the Japanese have been far from successful in delineation of the human figure. But their sculpture or painting of animal forms amazes by its grace; their bronze tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, are not mere copies of nature: they are exquisite idealizations of it."
Almost every paragraph seems to foreshadow some chapter in some one of Hearn's future books on Japan. With a memory of his papers on Japanese inserts, this, written in 1885, is significant:
"Perhaps it is bad taste on the writer's part, but the bugs and reptiles in cotton attracted his attention even more than the cranes. You see a Japanese tray covered with what appear to be dead and living bugs and beetles,—some apparently about to fly away; others with upturned abdomen, legs shrunk up, antennae inert. They are so life-like that you may actually weigh one in your hand a moment before you find that it is made of cotton. Everything, even to the joints of legs or abdomen, is exquisitely imitated: the metallic lustre of the beetle's armor is reproduced by a bronze varnish. There are cotton crickets with the lustre of lacquer, and cotton grasshoppers of many colors: the korogi, whose singing is like to the sound of a weaver, weaving rapidly ('ko-ro-ru, ko-ro-ru'), and the kirigisi, whose name is an imitation of its own note."
Or again, remembering his masterly description of an ascent of the famous Japanese mountain, read this, written long before he had ever seen it in the reality: "Splendid silks were hanging up everywhere, some exquisitely embroidered with attractive compositions, figures, landscapes, and especially views of Fusiyama, the matchless mountain, whose crater edges are shaped like the eight petals of the Sacred Lotos; Fusiyama, of which the great artist Houkousai alone drew one hundred different views; Fusiyama, whose snows may only be compared for pearly beauty to 'the white teeth of a young girl,' and whose summit magically changes its tints through the numberless variations of light. Everywhere it appears,—the wonderful mountain,—on fans, behind rains of gold, or athwart a furnace light of sunset, or against an immaculate blue, or gold burnished by some wizard dawn; in bronze, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke; on porcelain, towering above stretches of vineyard and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud sash of silky, shifting tints, like some beauty of Yosiwara."
At this period in his life there was not only a love of Creole folk-lore and a longing for Japan, but a very decided and deep interest in things Chinese. Not only was Hearn preparing himself for the writing of "Some Chinese Ghosts," but it is altogether probable that his dreams of a trip to Asia contemplated a sojourn in China as well as in Japan. The daintiness, the fairy-like beauty of the Island Empire won him, and China lost its chance for interpretation by a master. However, in his letter of March 7, 1885, telling of "The East at New Orleans," we find this relative to China:
"At either side of the main entrance is a great vase, carved from lips to base with complex designs in partial relief and enamelled in divers colors. In general effect of coloration the display is strictly Chinese; the dominating tone is yellow,—bright yellow, the sacred and cosmogonic color according to Chinese belief. When the Master of Heaven deigns to write, He writes with yellow ink only, save when He takes the lightning for His brush to trace a white sentence of destruction. So at least we are told in the book called Kan-ing p'ien,—the 'Book of Rewards and Punishments,' which further describes the writing of God as being in tchouen,—those antique 'seal-characters' now rarely seen except in jewel engraving, signatures stamped on works of art, or inscriptions upon monuments,—those primitive ideographic characters dating back perhaps to that age of which we have no historic record, but of which Chinese architecture, with its strange peaks and curves, offers us more than a suggestion,—the great Nomad Era."