Lafcadio Hearn

by Nina H. Kennard

"When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable.

"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written....

"From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances."

A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the city from that exalted position.

Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.' Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose."

Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them and to his fellow-reporters.

After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning, under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire.

Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art, he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position, the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist of Hearn's quality.

Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales, included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed."

As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the matter of social morality.