Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics, is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced enthusiasms.
He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and, unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no snobs; everything primitive and morally pure. Confound fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms distilled Elixir Vitæ."[19]
[19] Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friendship, the two comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion.
During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on board the Barracouta, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird atmosphere, that make his Japanese books so arresting and original, is a delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep," written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:—
"Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people. On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often be startled by something you feel, rather than hear behind you,—surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb oscillations of raiment,—and ere you can turn to look, the haunter swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."
"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated
"A mon cher ami,
"LÉOPOLD ARNOUX
"Notaire à Saint Pierre, Martinique.