The Krehbiels lived in a flat, 438, West Fifty-seventh Street, New York, and Lafcadio had arranged to stop with them there before he left New Orleans.
Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the Tribune necessitated his frequenting busy literary and social circles; it is easy to imagine how Hearn, just arrived from the easy-going, loafing life of New Orleans, must have suffered in such a milieu.
Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds, "that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a horrible nightmare, that he had been a demophobe for years, hating crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help it;—just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,—to see no one except you and Joe."
It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment and feeling must have arisen between them in that space of ten years, subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters transmitted across thousands of miles.
Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn, Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion.
Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths and Vandals—and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that claims art merit by a Gothic standard.
From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on the other hand—no musician from a technical point of view—frankly declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's sonata or an opera by Wagner.
Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "Hearn and Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions, by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The glissando effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal splinterings.' They had for him a great charm."
Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the Cosmopolitan Magazine. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see her. "Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you—but since you live in Hell what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison.
To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him, so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the Barracouta for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared originally in Harper's Monthly. It was afterwards incorporated in his larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies."