Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 11

I am very near-sighted, have lost one eye, which disfigures me considerably; and my near-sightedness always prevented the gratification of a natural _penchant_ for physical exercise. I am a good swimmer, that is all.

In reply to nearly all the questions about my near-sightedness I might answer, "Yes." I had the best advice in London, and observe all the rules you suggest.

Gla.s.ses strain the eye too much--part of retina is gone. The other eye was destroyed by a blow at college; or, rather, by inflammation consequent upon the blow. I can tell you more about myself when I see you, but the result will be more curious than pleasing. Myopia is not aggravating.

In "Shadowings," the chapter on "Nightmare-Touch," Hearn describes with his gift of the living word the dreams and hauntings he endured when as a boy he was shut in his room in the dark. It is a pitiful history, and shows how a child may suffer atrociously from the combination of an abnormally exuberant fancy and eye-strain, probably with added ocular disease. The subjective sensations and images were alive and Hearn's innate tendency to the horrible and hideous gave them the most awful of nightmarish realities.

I have already given (facing page 5) a copy of a little photograph of Hearn at about the age of eight, standing by Mrs. Brenane. It will be seen that the right eyeball was at this time about as large and protruding as in later life. This leaves a doubt whether the destruction of the left was due to the blow at college at the age of sixteen. In one of my letters he uses the word "scrofulous" in alluding to himself.

It was not only during the last years of his life, that, as he says, "it was now largely a question of eyes." It was always the most important of all questions; first, physically and financially, because all hung upon his ability to write many hours a day. How his little of visual power was preserved under the work done is a marvel of physiology. So unconscious was Hearn of the influence of eye-strain in ruining the health of others (he himself had no eye-strain in the ordinary meaning of the term) that he wonders why the hard students about him were inexplainably dying, going mad, getting sick, and giving up their studies. This is hardly to be considered a fault of Hearn when educators and physicians and oculists the world over, never suspect the reason.

Moved by sympathy, and perhaps by the vaguest feeling that to Hearn's poor vision were due, in part at least, both his personal and literary characteristics, I early besought him to make use of scientific optical helps in order to see the world better, and to carry on his writing with greater ease, and with less danger to the little vision left him. He had but one eye, which was evidently enormously nearsighted. The other had been lost in youth. I found that he had about 25 diopters of myopia, to use the jargon of the oculist, and that consequently he knew little about the appearance of objects even a few feet away. In writing he was compelled to place the paper or pen-point about three inches from his eye. With the proper lens it was possible to give him vision of distant objects about one-fourth as clear as that of normal eyes. For a minute my disappointment was equal to my surprise when I found that he did not wish to see with even this wretched indistinctness, and that he would not think of using spectacles or eyegla.s.ses. Later I found the reason for his action. He sometimes carried a little lens or monocle in his pocket, which somewhat bettered his vision, but in the several months he spent with me I saw him use it only once or twice, and then merely for an instant. I am almost sure that the reason for this preference for a world almost unseen, or seen only in colours, while form and outline were almost unknown, was never conscious with Hearn, although his mind was alert in detecting such psychologic solutions in others. In studying his writings, this reason finally has become clear to me.

When one chooses an artistic calling, Fate usually, and to the artist unconsciously, dictates the kind of art-work and the method of carrying it to realization. The blind do not choose to be painters, but musicians; the deaf do not think of music, though nothing prevents them from being good painters. The dumb would hardly become orators or singers, but they might easily be sculptors, or painters, or designers.

It is as evident that the poet is largely a visualizer, if one may so designate this psychic function, and without sight of the world of reality and beauty, poetry will inevitably lack the charm of the real and the lovely. Every great writer, in truth, shows more or less clearly that the spring and secret of his imagination lie preponderantly in the exceptional endowment, training, or sensitiveness of one of the princ.i.p.al senses of sight, hearing, or touch. A thousand quotations might be made from each of a dozen great writers to prove the thesis.

The man born blind, however, cannot become a poet, because true poetry must be conditioned upon things seen--"simple, sensuous, and pa.s.sionate"

demands the great critic; but interwoven and underrunning the simplicity, the pa.s.sion, and the sense, is and must be the world as mirrored by the eye. All thinking, all intellectual activity, is by no means of the image and the picture; all words are the product of the imagining, and the very letters of the alphabet are conventionalized pictures.

Physiologically, or normally, the perfection of the artist and of his workmanship thus depends upon the all-round perfection of his senses, the fulness of the materials and of his experience which these work on and in, and the logical and aesthetic rightness of systematization.

Conversely, a new pathology of genius is coming into view which shows the morbidizing of art and literature through disease, chiefly of the sense-organs of the artist and literary workman, but also by unnatural living, selfishness, sin, and the rest. As Hearn was probably the most myopic literary man that has existed, his own thoughts upon _The Artistic_ _Value of Myopia_ are of peculiar interest. In 1887 one of his editorials in the _Times-Democrat_ runs as follows:--

Probably more than one reader, on coming to page 15 of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's delightful book, "Landscape," was startled by the author's irrefutable statement that "the possession of very good eyesight may be a hindrance to those feelings of sublimity that exalt the poetic imagination." The fact is, that the impressiveness of natural scenery depends a great deal upon the apparent predominance of _ma.s.s_ over _detail_, to borrow Mr.

Hamerton's own words; the more visible the details of a large object,--a mountain, a tower, a forest wall, the less grand and impressive that object. The more apparently uniform the ma.s.s, the larger it seems to loom; the vaguer a shadow-s.p.a.ce, the deeper it appears. An impression of weirdness,--such as that obtainable in a Louisiana or Florida swamp-forest, or, much more, in those primeval and impenetrable forest-deeps described so powerfully by Humbolt,--is stronger in proportion to the spectator's indifference to lesser detail. The real effect of the scene must be a _general_ one to be understood. In painting, the artist does not attempt miscroscopic _minutiae_ in treating forest-forms; he simply attempts to render the effect of the ma.s.ses, with their characteristic generalities of shadow and colour. It is for this reason the photograph can never supplant the painting--not even when the art of photographing natural colours shall have been discovered.

Mr. Hamerton cites the example of a mountain, which always seems more imposing when wreathed in mists or half veiled by clouds, than when cutting sharply against the horizon with a strong light upon it. Half the secret of Dore's power as an ill.u.s.trator was his exaggerated perception of this fact,--his comprehension of the artistic witchcraft of _suggestion_. And since the perception of details depends vastly upon the quality of eyesight, a landscape necessarily suggests less to the keen-sighted man than to the myope. The keener the view, the less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of mysterious attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like the eye of the hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of each leaf. Far-seeing persons can, to a certain degree, comprehend this by recalling the impressions given in twilight by certain unfamiliar, or by even familiar objects,--such as furniture and clothing in a half-lighted room. The suggestiveness of form vanishes immediately upon the making of a strong light. Again, attractive objects viewed vaguely through a morning or evening haze, or at a great distance, often totally lose artistic character when a telescope is directed upon them.

In the February number of _Harper's Magazine_ we find a very clever and amusing poem by the scholarly Andrew Lang upon this very theme. The writer, after describing the christening-gifts of various kindly fairies, tells us that the wicked one--

--Said: "I shall be avenged on you.

My child, you shall grow up nearsighted!"

With magic juices did she lave Mine eyes, and wrought her wicked pleasure.

Well, of all the gifts the Fairies gave, _Her's_ is the present that I treasure!

The bore, whom others fear and flee, I do not fear, I do not flee him; I pa.s.s him calm as calm can be; I do not cut--I do not see him!

And with my feeble eyes and dim, Where _you_ see patchy fields and fences, For me the mists of Turner swim-- _My_ "azure distance" soon commences!

Nay, as I blink about the streets Of this befogged and miry city, Why, almost every girl one meets Seems preternaturally pretty!

"Try spectacles," one's friends intone; "You'll see the world correctly through them."

But I have visions of my own And not for worlds would I undo them!

This is quite witty and quite consoling to myopes, even as a cynical development of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's artistic philosophy. Still, it does not follow that the myope necessarily possesses the poetic faculty or feeling;--neither does it imply that the presbyope necessarily lacks it. If among French writers, for example, Gautier was notably nearsighted, Victor Hugo had an eye as keen as a bird's. It is true that a knowledge of the effect of shortsightedness on the imagination may be of benefit to a nearsighted man, who, possessing artistic qualities, can learn to take all possible advantage of his myopia,--to utilize his physical disability to a good purpose; but the longsighted artist need not be at a loss to find equally powerful sources of inspiration--he can seek them in morning mists, evening fogs, or those wonderful hazes of summer afternoons, when the land sends up all its vapours to the sun, like a smoke of gold. Beaudelaire, in his _Curiosites Esthetiques_, made an attempt to prove that the greatest schools of painting were evolved among hazy surroundings--Dutch fogs, Venetian mists, and the vapours of Italian marsh-lands.

The evolutionary tendency would seem to indicate for future man a keener vision than he at present possesses; and a finer perception of colour--for while there may be certain small emotional advantages connected with myopia, it is a serious hindrance in practical life. What effect keener sight will have on the artistic powers of the future man, can only be imagined--but an increasing tendency to realism in art is certainly perceptible; and perhaps an interesting chapter could be written upon the possible results to art of perfected optical instruments. The subject also suggests another idea,--that the total inability of a certain cla.s.s of highly educated persons to feel interest in a certain kind of art production may be partly accounted for by the possession of such keen visual perception as necessarily suppresses the sensation of breadth of effect, either in landscape or verbal description.

Thus, according to Flaubert, the myope looks at things one after another and describes details, while Hearn says the exact opposite. Both are wrong. The oculist will feel constrained to differ somewhat from Hearn in the foregoing article.

In May 1887 he reviews editorially an article of my own which I had sent him during the preceding year. Again, because there has never been a literary artist with a colour-sense so amazingly developed as that of Hearn, I venture to copy his commendation of my views:

COLOURS AND EMOTIONS

(May 8, 1887)

The evolutionary history of the Colour-Sense, very prettily treated of by Grant Allen and others, both in regard to the relation between fertilization of flowers by insects, and in regard to the aesthetic pleasure of man in contemplating certain colours, has also been considered in a very thorough way by American thinkers. Perhaps the most entertaining and instructive paper yet published on the subject was one in the _American Journal of Ophthalmology_ last September. It has just been reprinted in pamphlet form, under the t.i.tle of "The Human Colour-Sense as the Organic Response to Natural Stimuli;" and contains a remarkable amplification of these theories, rather suggested than laid down by the author of "Physiological aesthetics." Of course, the reader whom the subject can interest, comprehends that outside of the mind no such thing as colour exists; and that the phenomena of colours, like those of sound, are simply the results of exterior impressions upon nerve apparatus specially sensitive to vibrations--in the one case of ether, in the other of air.

Everybody, moreover,--even those totally ignorant of the physiology of the eye--know that certain colours are called primary or elementary. But it has probably occurred to few to ask why,--except in regard to mixing of paints in a drawing-school.

The theories of Gladstone and Magnus that the men of the Homeric era were colour-blind, because of the absence from the Homeric poems of certain words expressive of certain colours, have been disproved by more thorough modern research. The primitive man's sense of colour, or the sensitiveness of his retina to ether vibrations, may not have been as fine as that of the Roman mosaic-worker who could select his materials of 30,000 different tints, nor as that of Gobelin weavers, who can recognize 28,000 different shades of wool. But the evidence goes to show that the sense of colour is old as the gnawing of hunger or the pangs of fear,--old as the experience that taught living creatures to discern food and to flee from danger. There is, however, reason to suppose, from certain developmental phenomena observed in the eyes of children and newly-born animals, that the present condition of the colour-sense has been gradually reached--not so much in any particular species, as in all species possessing it,--just as vision itself must have been gradually acquired. Also showy colours must have been perceived before tints could be discerned; and even now we know through the spectroscope, that the human eye is not yet developed to the fullest possible perceptions of colour.

Now the first colours recognized by the first eyes must have presumably been just those we call primary,--Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. Yellow, the colour of gold, is also the colour of our sun; the brightest daylight has a more or less faint tinge even at noon, according to the state of the atmosphere;--and this tinge deepens at sunrise and sunset.

Red is the colour of blood,--a colour allied necessarily from time immemorial with violent mental impressions, whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world.

Blue,--the blue of the far away sky,--has necessarily always been for man the colour mysterious and holy,--always a.s.sociated with those high phenomena of heaven which first inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. These colours were probably first known to intelligent life; and their impressions are to-day the strongest. So violent, indeed, have they become to our refined civilized sense, that in apparel or decoration three of them, at least, are condemned when offered pure. Even the armies of the world are abandoning red uniforms;--no refined people wear flaming crimsons or scarlets or yellows;--n.o.body would paint a house or decorate a wall with a solid sheet of strong primary colour. Blue is still the least violent, the most agreeable to the artistic sense; and in subdued form it holds a place, in costume and in art, refused to less spiritual colours.

It might consequently be expected there should exist some correlation between the primary colours and the stronger emotional states of man. And such, indeed, proves to be the case. Emotionally the colours come in the order of Red, Yellow, Green, Blue. Red still appeals to the idea of Pa.s.sion,--for which very reason its artistic use is being more and more restrained. Very curious are the researches made by Grant Allen showing the fact of the sensual use of the red. In Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads "(the same suppressed work republished in this country under its first t.i.tle, "Laus Veneris"), the red epithets appear 159 times, while gold, green and blue words occur respectively 143, 86 and 25 times. In Tennyson's beautiful poem, "The Princess,"

the red words occur only 20 times, the gold 28, the green 5, the blue once. With all his exquisite sense of colour, Tennyson is sparing of adjectives;--there is no false skin to his work; it is solid muscle and bone.

Next to Red, the most emotional colour is Yellow--the colour of life, and of what men seem to prize next to life,--Gold.

We fancy we can live without green sometimes; it comes third; but it is the hue a.s.sociated with all the labours of man on the earth, since he began to labour. It is the colour of Industry. Blue has always been, since man commenced to think, and always will be, until he shall have ceased to think,--a.s.sociated with his spiritual sense,--his idea of many G.o.ds or of One,--his hopes of a second life, his faith, his good purposes, his perception of duty. Still, all who pray, turn up their faces toward the eternal azure. And with the modern expansion of the Idea of G.o.d, as with the modern expansion of the Idea of the Universe, the violet gulf of s.p.a.ce ever seems more mystical,--its pure colour more and more divine, and appeals to us as the colour of the Unknowable,--the colour of the Holy of Holies.

That Hearn wrote not from his own experience, out of his own heart, and with its blood, was due to the fact that life had denied him the needed experience; the personal materials, those that would interest the imaginative or imagining reader, did not exist. He must borrow, at first literally, which for him meant translation or retelling. The kind of things chosen was also dictated by the tragedy and pathos of his entire past life. But as if this pitiful tangling of the strands of Destiny were not enough, Fate added a knot of still more controlling misfortune. His adult life was pa.s.sed without the poet's most necessary help of good vision. Indeed he had such extremely poor vision that one might say it was only the merest fraction of the normal. A most hazy blur of colours was all he perceived of objects beyond a foot or two away. There was left for him the memory of a world of forms as seen in his childhood; but that fact throws into relief the fact that it was a memory. It needs little psychologic ac.u.men to realize how inaccurate would be our memories of trees, landscapes, mountains, oceans, cities, and the rest, seen only thirty years ago. How unsatisfying, how unreliable, especially for artistic purposes, must such memories be! To be sure, these haunting and dim recollections were, or might have been, helped out a little by pictures and photographs studied at the distance of three inches from the eye. The pathos of this, however, is increased by the fact that Hearn cared nothing for such photographs, etchings, engravings, etc. I never saw him look at one with attention or interest.

Paintings, water-colours, etc., were as useless to him as the natural views themselves.

Another way that he might have supplemented his infirmity was by means of his monocle, but he made little use of this poor device, because he instinctively recognized that it aided so meagrely. One cannot be sure how consciously he refused the help, or knew the reasons for his refusal. At best it could give him only a suggestion of the accurate knowledge which our eyes give us of distant objects, and not even his sensitive mind could know that it minimized the objects thus seen, and almost turned them into a caricaturing microscopic smallness, like that produced when we look through the large end of an opera-gla.s.s. What would we think of the world if we carried before our eyes an opera-gla.s.s thus inverted? Would not a second's such use be as foolish as continuous use? There was an optical and sensible reason for his refusal. With the subtle wisdom of the unconscious he refused to see plainly, because his successful work, his unique function, lay in the requickening of ancient sorrows, and of lost, aimless and errant souls. He supplemented the deficiencies of vision with a vivid imagination, a perfect memory, and a perfection of touch which gave some sense of solidity and content, and by hearing, that echo-like emphasized unreality; but his world was essentially a two-dimensional one. To add the _comble_ to his ocular misfortunes, he had but one eye, and therefore he had no stereoscopic vision, and hence almost no perception of solidity, thickness, or content except such as was gained by the sense of touch, memory, judgment, etc. The little glimpse of stereoscopic qualities was made impossible by the fact of his enormous myopia, and further by the comparative blindness to objects beyond a few inches or a few feet away from the eye. The small ball becomes flat when brought sufficiently near the eye. Practically the world beyond a few feet was not a three-dimensional one; it was coloured it is true, and bewilderingly so, but it was formless and flat, without much thickness or solidity, and almost without perspective.[18] Moreover, Hearn's single eye was divergent, and more of the world to his left side was invisible to him than to other single-eyed persons. Most noteworthy also is another fact,--the slowness of vision by a highly myopic eye. It takes it longer to see what it finally does see than in the case of other eyes. So all the movements of such a myopic person must be slow and careful, for he is in doubt about everything under foot, or even within reach of the hands. Hearn's myopia produced his manners.

[18] I have gathered, but must omit, a hundred illuminating quotations from Hearn's writings, ill.u.s.trating the truth of the formlessness and non-objectivity of his world, and how colour dominated his poorly seen universe.

Intellect, one must repeat, is largely, almost entirely, the product of vision,--especially the aesthetic part of intellect. And intellect, it should not be forgotten, is "desiccated emotion"; which brings us up sharply before the question of the effect upon aesthetic and general feeling, upon the soft swirl and lift and flitting rush of the emotional nature, in a psyche so sensitive and aerial as that of Hearn. In this rare ether one loses the significance of words, and the limitations of logic, but it may not be doubted that in the large, the summarized effect of thirty years of two-dimensional seeing and living, of a flat, formless, coloured world, upon the immeasurably quick, sensitive plate of Hearn's mind, was--well, it was what it was!

And who can describe that mind! Clearly and patently, it was a mind without creative ability, spring, or the desire for it. It was a mind improcreant by inheritance and by education, by necessity and by training, by poverty internal and external. To enable its master to live, it must write, and, as was pitifully evident, if it could not write in obedience to a creative instinct, it must do the next best thing. This residual second was to describe the external world, or at least so much of the externals of all worlds, physical, biological, or social, as romance or common-sense demanded to make the writing vivid, accurate, and bodied. Any good literature, especially the poetic, must be based on reality, must at least incidentally have its running obligato of reality. For the poet, again emphasized, vision is the intermediary, the broad, bright highway to facts. Prosaically, local colour requires the local seer. Barred from this divine roadway to and through the actual universe, the foiled mind of Hearn could choose but one course: to regarment, transform, and colour the world, devised and transmitted by others, and reversing the old [Greek: o logos sarx egeneto] rewrite the history of the soul as [Greek: sarx o logos egeneto], for in Hearn's alembic the solidest of flesh was "melted" and escaped in clouds of spirit; it was indeed often so disembodied and freed that one is lost in wonder at the mere vision of the cloudland so eerie, so silent, so void, so invisibly far, and fading ever still farther away. But, chained to the _here_ Hearn could not march on the bright road. He could never even see the road, or its ending. If freed to go, _there_ became _here_ with the intolerable limitation of his vision, the peculiarity of his unvision. The world, the world of the _there_ must be brought to him, and in the bringing it became the _here_. In the process, distant motion or action became dead, silent, and immobile being; distance was transformed to presence, and an intimacy of presence which at one blow destroyed scene, setting, and illumination. For, except to pa.s.sionate love, nearness and touch are not poetical or transfiguring, and to Hearn love never could come; at least it never did come. Except in boyhood he never, with any accuracy of expression or life, saw a human face; at the best, he saw faces only in the frozen photographs, and these interested him little.

With creative instinct or ability denied, with the poet's craving for open-eyed knowing, and with the poet's necessity of realizing the world out there, Hearn, baldly stated, was forced to become the poet of myopia. His groping mind was compelled to rest satisfied with the world of distance and reality transported by the magic carpet to the door of his imagination and fancy. There in a flash it was melted to formless spirit, recombined to soul, and given the semblance of a thin reincarnation, fashioned, refashioned, coloured, recoloured. There, lo!

that incomparable wonder of art, the haunting, magical essence of reality, the quivering, elusive protean ghost of the tragedy of dead pain, the smile of a lost universe murmuring _non dolet_ while it dies struck by the hand of the beloved murderer.

CHAPTER X.--HEARN'S STYLE

"THE 'lovers of the antique loveliness,'" wrote Hearn, "are proving to me the future possibilities of a long-cherished dream--the English realization of a Latin style, modelled upon foreign masters, and rendered even more forcible by that element of _strength_ which is the characteristic of the northern tongues." "I think that Genius must have greater attributes than mere creative power to be called to the front rank,--the thing created must be beautiful; it does not satisfy if the material be rich. I cannot content myself with ores and rough jewels, etc." "It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction a.n.a.logous to that warmth of colour and richness of imagery hitherto peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek, I _feel_ rather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon; and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of latter-day English or American romance." "The volume, 'Chinese Ghosts,' is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph some day, _poetical prose_." "A man's style, when fully developed, is part of his personality. Mine is being shaped to a particular end."

Hearn advised the use of the etymological dictionary in order to secure "that subtle sense of words to which much that _startles_ in poetry and prose is due." But although always remaining an artist in words, he, at his best, came to know that artistic technique in ideas is a more certain method of arousing and holding the readers' interest. He also strongly urges a knowledge of Science as more necessary to the formation of a strong style. In this, however, he never practised what he commended, because he had no mind for Science, nor knowledge of scientific things. He spoke with pride of writing the scientific editorials for his paper, but they were few and may quickly be ignored.

Flaubert was Hearn's literary deity; the technique of the two men was identical, and consisted of infinite pains with data, in phrase-building, sentence-making, and word-choosing. With no writer was the filing of the line ever carried to higher perfection than with both master and pupil; fortunately the younger had to make his living by his pen, and therefore he could not wreck himself upon the impossible task as did Flaubert. For nothing is more certain to ruin style and content, form as well as matter, than to make style and form the first consideration of a writer. Flaubert, the fashion-maker and supreme example of this school, came at last to recognize this truth, and wished that he might buy up and destroy all copies of "Madame Bovary;" and he summed up the unattainableness of the ideal, as well as the resultant abysmal pessimism, when he said that "form is only an error of sense, and substance a fancy of your thought." His ever-repeated "Art has no morality," "The moment a thing is true it is good," "Style is an absolute method of seeing things," "The idea exists only by virtue of its form," etc., led Flaubert and his thousand imitators into the quagmire which Zola, Wilde, Shaw, and decadent journalism generally so admirably ill.u.s.trate. That Hearn escaped from the bog is due to several interesting reasons, the chief being his poverty, which compelled him to write much, and his audience, which, being Anglo-Saxon (and therefore properly and thoroughly cursed), would not buy the elegant p.o.r.nography of Flaubert and the gentlemen who succeeded, or did not succeed, in the perfection of the worship and of the works of the master of them all.

And then Hearn was himself at least part Anglo-Saxon, so that he shrank from perfection in the method.

There is a pathetic proof of the lesson doubly repeated in the lives of both Flaubert and Hearn. "St. Anthony" was rewritten three times, and each time the failures might be called, great, greater, greatest. There lies before me Hearn's ma.n.u.script translation of the third revision of the work, in two large volumes, with a printed pamphlet of directions to the printer, an Introduction, etc.,--a great labour a.s.suredly on Hearn's part. No publisher could be found to give it to the world of English readers![19] Moreover, there was never in his life any personal happiness, romance, poetry, or satisfaction which could serve as the material of Hearn's aesthetic faculty. Almost every hour of that life had been lived in physical or mental anguish, denied desire, crushed yearnings, and unguided waywardness. Born of a Greek mother, and a roving English father, his childhood was pa.s.sed in an absurd French school where another might have become a dwarfed and potted Chinese tree. Flung upon the alien world of the United States in youth, without self-knowledge, experience, or self-guiding power, he drank for years all the bitter poisons of poverty, ba.n.a.lity, and the rest, which may not shatter the moral and mental health of strong and coa.r.s.e natures. By nature and necessity shy beyond belief, none may imagine the poignant sufferings he endured, and how from it all he writhed at last to manhood and self-consciousness, preserved a weird yet real beauty of soul, a morbid yet genuine artist-power, a child-like and childish, yet most involuted and mysterious heart, a supple and subtle, yet illogical and contentless intellect.

[19] Particulars concerning the ma.n.u.script translation of "St.

Anthony" are given in the Bibliography of Miss Stedman, Hearn's "Argument" of the book being reprinted in full.

The most striking evidence of the pathetic and unmatched endowment and experience is that, while circ.u.mstance dictated that he should be a romancer, no facts in his own life could be used as his material. There had been no romance, no love, no happiness, no interesting personal data, upon which he could draw to give his imagination play, vividness, actuality, or even the semblance of reality. So sombre and tragic, moreover, had been his own living that the choice of his themes could only be of unhealthy, almost unnatural, import and colouring. He therefore chose to work over the imaginings of other writers, and perforce of morbid ones.

A glance at his library confirms the opinion. When Hearn left for j.a.pan, he turned over to me several hundred volumes which he had collected and did not wish to take with him. His most-prized books he had had especially rebound in dainty morocco covers, and these, particularly, point to the already established taste, the yearning for the strange, the weird, and the ghost-like, the gathered and pressed exotic flowers of folklore, the ba.n.a.lities and morbidities of writers with unleashed imaginations, the love of antique religions and peoples, the mysteries of mystics, the descriptions of savage life and rites--all mixed with dictionaries, handbooks, systems of philosophy, etc.