Lafcadio Hearn

by Nina H. Kennard

A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love, yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she, unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away forever.

Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron. Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who preserved freedom of thought and action—absolute quiet, silence, dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself in the mediocrity to which she belonged.

Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness, and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought, une jeune fille un peu farouche (no English word could give the same sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a particular variety of savage, that he could not understand—and was afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since then I have become grey and the father of three boys."

For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems, he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres françaises' (as Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy...."

Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her, mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom in the room—but in the future, which was black without stars!"

In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the Tertiary epoch—three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most ancient branch of humanity."

It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was written and contributed to Harper's Magazine under the title of "Torn Letters."

We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his genius and quickened his pen.

I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or Karma (as he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn—the Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.

In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the Cosmopolitan, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.