To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work. Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion, especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument; these he would leave later on Gould's study table.
To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour. Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature, inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed amongst an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought; his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of spirit—perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding him—a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of remarkable picturesqueness and reality.
The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the world.
Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore, been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories, incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all, in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are addressed.
It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever cometh.'"
He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles, publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist, he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable."
Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a particle of literary jealousy in his composition.
To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical. You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think."
Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others would reach the same standard.
In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College.