Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 1

Concerning Lafcadio Hearn.

by George M. Gould.

PREFACE

THERE are as many possible biographies of a man as there are possible biographers--and one more! Of Lafcadio Hearn there has been, and there will be, no excuse for any biography whatever. A properly edited volume of his letters, and, perhaps, a critical estimate of the methods and development of his imaginative power and literary character are, and still remain, most desirable. That some competent hand may yet be found to undertake this task is still hoped by those who recognize the value of a man's best work. To furnish material and help toward this end is my object in collecting the following pages. The life of a literary man interests and is of value to the world because of the literature he has created. Without a bibliography, without even mention of the works he wrote, his biography would be useless. To correct many untrue and misleading statements and inferences of a serious nature that have been published concerning him and his life, should it ever be undertaken, will prove a labour so difficult and thankless that it will scarcely be entered upon by one who would do it rightly. That it will not be hazarded comes, as I have said, from the fact that it is not needed, because neither Hearn himself, nor his real friends, nor again, a discriminating literary sense, have been, nor can be, under any illusion as to his "greatness." He has been spoken of as "a great man," which, of course, he was not. Two talents he had, but these were far from const.i.tuting personal greatness. Deprived by nature, by the necessities of his life, or by conscious intention, of religion, morality, scholarship, magnanimity, loyalty, character, benevolence, and other const.i.tuents of personal greatness, it is more than folly to endeavour to place him thus wrongly before the world.

The irony of the situation is pathetically heightened by the fact that, supposing him to be very great, "the weaknesses of very great men,"

which he said should not be spoken of, are amazingly paraded in the letters. Had he ever dreamed that his letters would be published, he would not, and could not, have so unblushingly exposed himself and his faults to the public gaze. The fact has now been writ exceeding large, or it would not be, and should not be, corrected and contradicted. A word to the wise suffices.

There remains the question, truly pertinent, concerning the nature and progress toward perfection of his imagination, and of his literary execution.

We know nothing, and doubtless we may never know anything definite, accurate and of value about the character either of his father or of his mother. Any attempt, therefore, to estimate what effect heredity had in handing down the strange endowment we find in his early manhood is wholly futile. We may not be too sure concerning either the parentage or nationality ascribed to him.

Moreover, in the last a.n.a.lysis, Hearn was no "product of his environment." In a certain sense, he was of the school of Flaubert, Gautier, Maupa.s.sant, Loti, and Zola, but with such differences and variations that these teachers may not take much credit or flattery to themselves. The great, the distinctive, the dominating force which controlled and created Hearn's literary makings, his morbid vision, was not "environment" as the critics and scientists mean by the term. These have not yet learned that Art and Life hang upon the perfection and peculiarities of the senses of the artist and of the one who lives, and that intellect and especially aesthetics are almost wholly the product of vision. Conversely, the morbidities and individualisms of Art and Life often depend pre-eminently upon the morbidities of vision.

Character, lastly, is the action or reaction of personality against circ.u.mstance, not under and dominated by circ.u.mstance. To have character is to control circ.u.mstance; Hearn was always its slave. Except in one particular, the pursuit of literary excellence, Hearn had no character whatever. His was the most unresisting, most echolike mind I have ever known. He was a perfect chameleon; he took for the time the colour of his surroundings. He was always the mirror of the friend of the instant, or if no friend was there, of the dream of that instant. The next minute he was another being, acted upon by the new circ.u.mstance, reflecting the new friend, or redreaming the old and new-found dream. They who blame him too sharply for his disloyalty and ingrat.i.tude to old friends do not understand him psychologically. There was nothing behind the physical and neurologic machine to be loyal or disloyal. He had no mind, or character, to be possessed of loyalty or disloyalty. For the most part, he simply dropped his friends, and rarely spoke ill of them or of his enemies. There was nothing whatever in him, except perhaps for the short time when he said his friend had given him a soul, to take the cast and function of loyalty or disloyalty, grat.i.tude or ingrat.i.tude. One does not ask originality or even great consistency of an echo, and, of all men that have ever lived, Hearn, mentally and spiritually, was most perfectly an echo. The sole quality, the only originality, he brought to the fact, or to the echo, was colour--a peculiar derivation of a maimed sense. He created or invented nothing; his stories were always told him by others; at first they were gruesome tales even to horror and disgust.

He learned by practice to choose lovelier stories, ones always distant, sometimes infinitely distant, and he learned to retell or echo them with more artistic skill and even a matchless grace. His merit, almost his sole merit, and his unique skill lay in the strange faculty of colouring the echo with the hues and tints of heavenly rainbows and unearthly sunsets, all gleaming with a ghostly light that never was on sea or sh.o.r.e. So that, fused as he was with his work, he himself became that impossible thing, a chromatic voice, a multicoloured echo.

We must, therefore, accept the facts as we find them, the young man as we find him, uneducated, friendless, without formed character, with a lot of heathenish and unrestrained appet.i.tes, crippled as to the most important of the senses, poverty-stricken, improvident, of peculiar and unprepossessing appearance and manners, flung into an alien world in many ways more morbid than himself. That he lived at all is almost astonishing, and that he writhed out, how he did it, and the means whereby he finally presented to the best artistic and literary intellects of the world prized values and enjoyments, is indeed worthy of some attention and study.

From letters written to me just prior to his death by that veteran and discriminating critic, Mr. Edmund C. Stedman, I quote a few sentences to show that the appreciation of Hearn has by no means reached its full measure:

"I pa.s.sed an evening with your Hearn ma.n.u.script and the supplementary matter by my granddaughter, and found them both well done and of deep interest. Some of your pa.s.sages are beautifully written and make me think that if you will give us more of the style which is so plainly at your command, you will gain, etc.... The publishers do not understand, as I do, that Hearn will in time be as much of a romantic personality and tradition as Poe now is. I strongly urged one publisher to buy those copyrights owned by three other firms on any terms and in the end bring out a definitive edition of his complete works."

As to Miss Stedman's workmanlike bibliography, it should be said that the rule which has been followed in excluding less valuable reviews and notices, was based upon the effort to include doubtful ones only when of exceptional value, by a personal friend of Hearn, etc. Files of ordinary newspapers are not preserved even in local libraries, and, therefore, references to them have been excluded except under peculiar circ.u.mstances of authorship, opinions stated, etc.

For their kind permission to make extracts from Hearn's published works, grateful acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Little, Brown and Company, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper Brothers, and The Macmillan Company.

Should this volume bring in more money than the necessary expenses of compiling it, the excess will be sent to Mrs. Hearn through the j.a.panese Consul, or in some other way.

GEORGE M. GOULD.

CHAPTER I.--HEREDITY AND THE EARLY LIFE

[Ill.u.s.tration: HEARN AT ABOUT THE AGE OF EIGHT.

_From a Photograph._]

_To face page 1._

MANY conflicting accounts have been given concerning Hearn's parents and childhood. From his own statements made in 1889, the notes of which, taken down at the moment, are before me, he was born on June 27, 1850, at Leucadia, in Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Islands. His father, he said, was an Irishman, Charles Bush Hearn, Surgeon-Major in the 76th English Infantry Regiment, which had been stationed at Madras, Calcutta.

The regiment was later merged into the 22nd West Riding Battalion. His mother was a Greek from Cerigo, another of the Ionian Isles; her name he had forgotten. He spoke of his father and mother as having been married, and of a subsequent divorce, about 1857 or 1858. Allusion was made to a younger brother, named Daniel, who was brought up by an artist, a painter, Richard Hearn, a brother of Charles Bush Hearn, who lived in Paris.[1] Hearn thought this brother was educated as a civil engineer.

After the divorce his mother remarried, her second husband being a lawyer, a Greek, name unknown, and living at Smyrna, Asia Minor.

Lafcadio's father also remarried, taking his wife to India. Three daughters were said to have been born there. Lafcadio was put under the care of his aunt, Mrs. Sarah Brenane, of Dublin, No. 73 Upper Leeson Street. She was a widow without children. In a letter to me, written prior to 1889, Hearn says: "As for me, I have a good deal in me _not_ to thank my ancestors for; and it is a pleasure that _I cannot_, even if I would, trace myself two generations back, not even one generation on my mother's side. Half these Greeks are mixed with Turks and Arabs--don't know how much of an Oriental mixture I have, or may have." And again, "I do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead. My father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history of my mother's marriage." He told me later that this romance was said to have been that Surgeon-Major Hearn was once set upon by the brothers of the young Greek woman to whom he was paying attention, and that he was left supposedly dead, with about a score of dagger-made wounds in his body.

[1] In _The Bookbuyer_, May, 1896, Hearn's friend, Mr. J. S.

Tunison, speaks of the existence of a brother, "a busy farmer in Northwestern Ohio."

In the Dayton, Ohio, _Journal_, of December 25, 1906, Mr. Tunison speaks authoritatively of the discrepant accounts given by many writers, and by Hearn himself, concerning his parents, birth and early years. "Hearn himself had misgivings, and sometimes a.s.sociated his baptismal name with the not uncommon Spanish name, Leocadie." The boy, of course, could only repeat what he had been told by his relatives or friends. Physiognomy can help little perhaps, but here its testimony is a.s.suredly not confirmatory of the more common story. Any attempt to secure definite information in Ireland would scarcely be successful. One possibility remained: There is still living an Irish gentleman to whom Lafcadio was sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was placed. I have not the right to mention his name. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870, and through his brother-in-law in Ireland, Lafcadio was, as it were, consigned to my informant. The subject is an unpleasant one to him, and he answered my questions with reluctance. He did not like the boy and did not feel that he had any obligation toward him; in fact, he did not feel that he was in any way responsible for his care. Besides, he had heavy duties toward his own children that absorbed all his energies. "I never had a letter from him. He came to the house three times. Mrs. Brenane sent me money, which I gave to him to pay his bills with. When he got work, he never came near me again." He was not sure that Mrs. Brenane was, in truth, Hearn's aunt, and upon being pressed, answered repeatedly, "I know nothing, n.o.body knows anything true of Hearn's life. He may have been related to my wife's family, but I never knew." Asked why the lad was "shipped" to him, he replied, "I do not know." Inquiries concerning the boy's schooling brought no more than, "I only know that he could never stay long in one school." "His father was Irish, was he not?" "Yes." "And his mother was Greek?" "O yes, I suppose so," but with an indefinite inflection.

The mystery, therefore, of Hearn's parentage and boyhood years is probably not to be cleared up. He was, perhaps, a "bad boy," and expelled from several schools; his lifelong hatred and fear of Catholics and Jesuits doubtless dates from these youthful and irrational experiences; but it is useless to inquire whether or not they were in any sense justifiable. A little reflected light is thrown upon this period by an apocryphal anecdote in a letter to me, written while Hearn was at my house, and which Miss Bisland in her "Life and Letters" kindly failed to put in its proper place,[2] as well as omitted to say whence she obtained it:

[2] Vol. I, pp. 459-460, just prior to the last paragraph.

This again reminds me of something. When I was a boy, I had to go to confession, and my confessions were honest ones.

One day I told the ghostly father that I had been guilty of desiring that the devil would come to me in the shape of the beautiful woman in which he came to the Anchorites in the desert, and that I thought that I would yield to such temptations. He was a grim man who rarely showed emotion, my confessor, but on that occasion he actually rose to his feet in anger.

"Let me warn you!" he cried, "let me warn you! Of all things never wish that! You might be more sorry for it than you can possibly believe!"

His earnestness filled me with fearful joy;--for I thought the temptation might actually be realized--so serious he looked ... but the pretty _succubi_ all continued to remain in h.e.l.l.

The necessary inference, therefore, is that the lad was an unwelcome charge upon those Irish relations or friends of his father, in whose care he was placed. It is said that he always spoke with bitterness of his father, and with love of his mother. Beyond a certain amount of money allotted (by his father?) for his support, neither parent was evidently concerned about his upbringing and welfare, and all who should have been interested in those things made haste to rid themselves of the obligations. If the stories of his boyish "badness" were true, the lad could not be blamed for putting into practice his inherited instincts, so that the pathos of his early misfortunes only increase our sympathy for the youth and his tragedies. (I reproduce a photograph of Lafcadio and his aunt, Mrs. Justin, or Sarah, Brenane. The lad must have been at the time about eight years of age.) The "consignment" of the nineteen-year old youth to the distant relative of the family, who was then living in Cincinnati, explains the reason why, landing in New York, he finally went to Cincinnati. How long he lived in New York City and any details of his life there before he went West, may be held as beyond investigation. Mr. Tunison incidentally speaks of him during this time as "sleeping in dry-goods boxes on the street, etc.," and I have heard that he acted as a restaurant waiter. There have been published stories of a period of want and suffering endured in London before the emigration to New York City. Others concerning great scholarship and the intimate knowledge of several languages, especially French, are surely not true. Even in 1889, after the New Orleans and Martinique periods, Hearn could not speak French with ease or correctness. In Cincinnati he secured the help of a French scholar in translating Gautier's "emaux et Camees." His want of knowledge of the Latin language is deplored in his letters and, to the last, after a dozen or more years in j.a.pan, his inability to read a j.a.panese newspaper or speak the language was a source of regret to himself, of errors too numerous to mention, and of grievous limitations in his work as an interpreter. In the one field of which his taste, apt.i.tude and function dictated a wide and stimulating acquaintance, folk-lore, he was lamentably wanting. It might seem unfitting to allude to this were it not well to be discriminating in all cases, and had not Hearn sought to reach authoritativeness in a department wherein he had not gathered the fundamental data.

CHAPTER II.--IN PERSON

WHEN, in 1889, Hearn appeared in my reception room, although I had not seen any photograph of him, and had not even known of his coming, I at once said, "You are Lafcadio?" The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that I am sure he would have run out of the house if I had not at once shown him an overflowing kindness, or if a tone of voice had betrayed any curiosity or doubt. It was at once agreed that he should stay with me for awhile, and there was no delay in providing him with a seat at my table and a room where he could be at his work of proof-correcting. His "Two Years in the French West Indies" was then going through the press, and an incident connected with the proof-reading ill.u.s.trates how impossible it was for him, except when necessity drove, to meet any person not already known. He wished to give his reader the tune of the songs printed on pages 426-431, but he knew nothing of music. I arranged with a lady to repeat the airs on her piano as he should whistle them, and then to write them on the music-staff. When the fatal evening arrived, Hearn and I went to the lady's house, but as we proceeded his part in our chatting lapsed into silence, and he lagged behind. Although he finally dragged himself to the foot of the doorstep, after I had rung the bell, his courage failed, and before the door was opened I saw him running as if for life, half a square away!

Even before this adventure I had learned that it was useless to try to get him to lunch or dinner if any stranger were present. I think he always listened to detect the possible presence of a stranger before entering the dining-room, and he would certainly have starved rather than submit to such an ordeal. It may be readily imagined that my attempt to secure his services as a lecturer before a local literary society was a ludricrous failure. He would have preferred hanging.

I allude to this att.i.tude of his mind from no idle or curious reason, but because it arose from logical and necessary reasons. When, later, he was in j.a.pan, I was once importuned, and should not have yielded, to give a friend, who was about to visit Tokyo, a note of introduction. As I warned my friend Hearn refused to see visitors.

That his extreme shyness depended upon his being unknown, and that it was united to a lack of humour, may be gathered from the fact that, when he came from Martinique, he wore a clothing which inevitably made the pa.s.sers-by turn and look and smile. Long and repeated endeavours were necessary before I could get his consent to lay aside the outrageous tropical hat for one that would not attract attention. How little he recked of this appears from the tale I heard that a lot of street gamins in Philadelphia formed a _queue_, the leader holding by Hearn's coat-tails, and, as they marched, all kept step and sang in time, "Where, where, where did you get that hat?"

At once, upon first meeting Hearn, I instinctively recognized that upon my part the slightest sign of a desire or attempt to study him, to look upon him as an object of literary or "natural" history, would immediately put an end to our relations. Indeed, it never at that time entered my mind to think thus of him, and only since collections of his letters and biographies are threatened has it occurred to me to think over our days and months together, and to help, so far as advisable, toward a true understanding of the man and his art.

In 1889 Lafcadio was 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighed 137 pounds, and had a chest girth of 36-3/4 inches.

The summer of 1889 made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character. I suspect it was his first experience in anything that might be called home-life. To his beloved _pays des revenants_, Martinique, his mind constantly reverted, with an _Ahnung_ that he should never see it again.

There are truth and pathos and keen self-knowledge, frankly expressed in the letters he would write me in the next room, immediately after we had chatted long together, and when he felt that the pen could better express what he shyly shrank from speaking:

Ah! to have a profession is to be rich, to have international current-money, a gold that is cosmopolitan, pa.s.ses everywhere. Then I think I would never settle down in any place; would visit all, wander about as long as I could. There is such a delightful pleasantness about the _first_ relations with people in strange places--before you have made any rival, excited any ill wills, incurred anybody's displeasure. Stay long enough in any one place and the illusion is over; you have to sift this society through the meshes of your nerves, and find perhaps one good friendship too large to pa.s.s through.

It is a very beautiful world; the ugliness of some humanity only exists as the shadowing that outlines the view; the n.o.bility of man and the goodness of woman can only be felt by those who know the possibilities of degradation and corruption. Philosophically I am simply a follower of Spencer, whose mind gives me the greatest conception of Divinity I can yet expand to receive. The faultiness is not with the world, but with myself. I inherit certain susceptibilities, weaknesses, sensitivenesses, which render it impossible to adapt myself to the ordinary _milieu_; I have to make one of my own wherever I go, and never mingle with that already made. True, I love much knowledge, but I escape pains which, in spite of all your own knowledge, you could wholly comprehend, for the simple reason that you _can_ mingle with men.

I am really quite lonesome for you, and am reflecting how much more lonesome I shall be in some outrageous equatorial country where I shall not see you any more;--also it seems to me perfectly and inexplainably atrocious to know that some day or other there will be no Gooley at ---- St. That I should cease to make a shadow some day seems quite natural, because Hearney boy is only a bubble anyhow ("The earth hath bubbles"),--but you, hating mysteries and seeing and feeling and knowing everything,--you have no right ever to die at all. And I can't help doubting whether you will. You have almost made me believe what you do not believe yourself: that there are souls. I haven't any, I know; but I think you have,--something electrical and luminous inside you that will walk about and see things always. Are you really--what I see of you--only an Envelope of something subtler and perpetual? Because if you are, I might want you to pa.s.s down some day southward,--over the blue zone and the volcanic peaks like a little wind,--and flutter through the palm-plumes under the all-putrefying sun,--and reach down through old roots to the bones of me, and try to raise me up....