Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 2

The lamps, dripping huge water-drops fire-tinged from their lurid glare, seemed monstrous yellow goblin-eyes, weeping phosph.o.r.escent tears.

It was raining, and the funereal sky flamed with lightning.

It was such a rain as in the primeval world created verdant seas of slimy mud, subsequently condensed into that fossiliferous strata where to-day spectacled geologists find imbedded the awful remains of the t.i.tanic _iguanodon_, the _plesiosaurus_, and the _icthyosaurus_.

We sat motionlessly meditative in the shadows of a Gothic doorway of medieval pattern, and ruefully observed the movements of a giant rat, slaking his thirst at a water-spout. Suddenly we were aware of a pressure--a gentle pressure on our shoulder.

A hurried glance convinced us that the pressure was occasioned by the presence of a hand.

It was a long, bony, ancient hand, dried and withered to the consistency of India-rubber. It might have been compared to the hand of a mummy embalmed in the reign of Rameses III, but we felt a living warmth in its pressure, penetrating our summer linen.

The Oriental wizards occasionally need the a.s.sistance of a magic candle, in their groping amid ancient tombs--a candle which burns with a fuming stench so foul, that hungry ghouls flee dismayedly away. This candle is made of green fat--the fat of men long dead. For such a candle it is of course necessary to have a candlestick. To procure this candlestick it is necessary to cut off the right hand of a murderous criminal executed by impalement, and having carefully dried it, to insert the candle in its ghastly grasp. Now the hand laid on our shoulder strongly resembled such a hand.

The living warmth of its pressure alone restrained us from uttering a shriek of hideous fear. A cold sweat ravaged the starched bosom of our under-garment.

Suddenly a face peered out from the shadow, and the sickly glare of the flickering gas-lamp fell full upon it.

The aspect of that face immediately rea.s.sured us.

It was long to grotesqueness and meagre even to weirdness.

It would have been strongly Mephistophelic but for an air of joviality that was not wholly saturnine. The eyes were deep, piercing, but "laughter-stirred," as those of Haroun Alraschid. The nose was almost satanically aquiline, but its harsh outline was more than relieved by the long smiling mouth, and the countless wrinkles of merriment that intersected one another in crow's-feet all over the ancient face. The stranger's complexion was that of caout-chouc; and his long lank locks were blacker than the plumage of those yellow-footed birds that prey upon the dead. His whole aspect was that of one who, by some eerie, occult art of self-preservation, had been enabled to live through the centuries.

"Am I not addressing the celebrated author----?" said the voice of the uncouthly-featured.

It was a half-merry, half-mocking voice--a deep voice that sounded as though conveyed from a vast distance through the medium of a pneumatic tube.

It therefore resembled in its tone the dreamily-distant voices never-slumbering Fancy hears in the hours devoted to darkness and slumber by moral people.

An enormous drop of soot-tinged water fell upon our nose, incontestably proving that we were awake; and we murmured monosyllabic a.s.sent to the stranger's query.

"It is well," replied the Unknown, with a lat.i.tudinarian smile of joy. "I have been seeking you. I need your a.s.sistance, your talent, your mental vigour so enormously manifested in your cyclopean[7] phrenological development."

[7] The contrast of this allusion to his large single eye with his morbid shyness about it of late years is noteworthy.

"_Sapristi_, monsieur!--permit me to inquire the nature of----"

"Attend a little, friend, and your curiosity shall be sated with ample satisfaction. I have existed as you see through all ages. I have lived under a thousand alias names, under the various regimes of a thousand civilizations, which flourished on ancient soil now covered by the mile-deep waters of foaming oceans. I have made my dwelling-place in the mighty palace-halls of Egyptian kings, in the giant cities of dead a.s.syria, in the residences of Aztec monarchs and Peruvian Incas, in the snow-columned temples of the Greek, and the lordly homes of the luxurious Roman. In fact, I am rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; and have been worshipped as a genius in far-sparkling planets ere this mundane sphere was first evolved from that flaming orb. In all time when individualized intelligent thought existed, I have inculcated in living beings the truth of that sublime and eternal maxim--Laugh and grow fat. To-day men must be taught this glorious truth by the Bullock Press rather than the Tongue. I want your pen, not your tongue. Write me a salutatory for my new ill.u.s.trated weekly--only five cents a copy."

With these words he pressed a glazed Bristol-board card into our trembling hand, and disappeared.

By the light of the weeping street-lamps we read thereon this weird legend:

GIGLAMPZ

The t.i.tle itself, the Introduction by "Kladderadatsch," and the character of the contributions and cuts make it plain that the third object of the publication, called "Satire," was designed to be much more prominent than "Art" or "Literature." Unquestionably an American _Kladderadatsch_ was planned, and by Hearn and his friends it was supposed that the editor had a sense of humour sufficient to carry on the undertaking. I have quoted the Salutatory to show that with the favouring of youth, ambition, opportunity and the best encouragement, Hearn's mind from the first line drifted inevitably to the fearsome, the weird, the unearthly and far-away. By no power or necessity could his imagination be forced or bound to the task of producing things comic or even satiric, especially such humour and jokes as the Cincinnati newspaper reader wanted in 1874. Of the twelve columns of reading in the first number of _Giglampz_, Hearn contributed about eight, made up of fifteen or twenty distinct paragraphs. In the second number his contributions number seven; in the third, six; in the fourth, three; in the fifth, four; in the sixth, two; in the seventh, one; in the eighth, one. In about a dozen of the first number, he somewhat unsuccessfully tried to be humorous or satiric, while six were frankly tragical, critical, bitter, etc. In the succeeding numbers Hearn made little effort to be humorous; in the fifth number he describes with startling power a picture of "a hideous scene in the interior of a seraglio;" in number six he returns to the Orient and in "The Fantasy of a Fan" mixes poetry, prose and fancy with a hinting of the subtle soft witchery of the Hearn of twenty-five years later.[8] In the second number is a full-page cut, in which Beecher is depicted as standing before a crowd of jeerers prior to being placed in the stocks, with the scarlet letter "A" upon his breast. Hearn especially requested Mr. Farney to make him one of the conspicuous spectators. The bespectacled face is easily recognizable in the copy given me by the artist. In the seventh number Hearn describes in two columns the story he supposes behind the pictured Gabriel Max, called "The Last Farewell" (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York). It shows so early suggestions of the manhood strength of the wordmaster that I copy it:

[8] Mr. Farney tells me that he had to compel Hearn, even then, to moderate the boldness of sentences which would by their sensualism and licence shock their Cincinnati readers.

THE TALE A PICTURE TELLS

"_Butchered to make a Roman Holiday_"

The remarkably fine engraving from Gabriel Max's picture, "The Last Farewell," in a late issue of the Berlin _Ill.u.s.trirte Zeitung_ (and which the New York _Graphic_ a few days since stole to spoil in the stealing), is worthy of the celebrated original at Munich--a painting which will never be forgotten by those who have once beheld it. Among modern painters, probably Max has no superior in the art of harmoniously blending the horrible with the pathetic; and in none of his works is this peculiar power exhibited to better advantage than in "The Last Farewell:" a marvel of colour and composition, one of those rare pictures which seem to reflect the living shadows of a dead age with the weird truthfulness of a wizard's mirror.

A beautiful Roman girl is exposed in the Flavian amphitheatre, to be devoured by wild beasts. She can scarcely be eighteen years old, judging from the slender delicacy of her limbs and the childish sweetness of the pretty little brown face which she has vainly been striving to screen from the rude gaze of the shameless populace with the remnants of a rich black veil--probably torn by the rough hands of some brutal lanista. She leans with her back to the great wall of stone, calmly awaiting her fate without any signs of fear, although the hot, foul breath of a panther is already warm upon her naked feet. To her right, but a few feet away, a leopard and a huge bear are tearing each other to pieces; on her left, another den has just been thrown open, and at its entrance appears the hideous head of an immense tiger, with eyes that flame like emeralds.

You can almost feel the warmth of the fierce summer sun shining on that scene of blood and crime, falling on the yellow sands of the arena, drying the dark pools of human blood the wild beasts have left unlapped. You can almost hear the deep hum of a hundred thousand voices above, and the hideous growlings of the contending brutes below. You wonder whether there is one heart in all that vast crowd of cruel spectators wherein some faint impulse of humanity still lingers, one tongue charitable enough to exclaim:

"Poor little thing!"

No: only wicked whispers followed by coa.r.s.e laughter; monstrous indifference in the lower tiers, brutal yells of bloodthirsty impatience from the upper seats.

Two Roman knights relieve the monotony of the scene by strange speculation.

"One hundred sesterces that the tiger gets her first!"

"Two hundred on the panther!"

"Done, by the G.o.ds! Where are the lions?"

"Why, that cursed barbarian killed the last three this morning, one after another. The finest lions of the lot, too."

"Who are you talking about?--that tall, dark Thracian?"

"No: he was killed the day before by the same gladiator that killed the lions. I mean that golden-haired giant--that Goth. Says he was chief in his own country, or something.

He's killed everybody and everything pitted against him so far. And this morning they put him naked in the arena, with nothing but a mirmillo's shield, and a sword; and let the lions loose on him one after another. I bet a thousand sesterces on that little Numidian lion; but the rascal killed him as he sprang, with one sword-thrust, and I lost my thousand sesterces. By Hercules, that Goth is a match for a dozen lions!"

"Brave fellow, by all the G.o.ds! Did they give him the wooden sword?"

"Julius Cortonus says they did. I didn't stay to see the rest of the games, for I was too angry about my thousand sesterces."

"Furies take that tiger!--I believe the brute's afraid of the girl!"

"Why, it is madness to throw such a fine-limbed girl as that to the lions!" cries a Greek merchant, lately arrived in Rome. "Eyes and hair, by Zeus, like Venus Anadyomene. I could sell her for a fortune in a slave-market."

"Aedepol! not in a Roman slave-market, you fool. Why, I've known Lucullus to throw better-looking girls than that into his fishpond, to fatten his lampreys with. May Cerberus swallow that cursed tiger!"

The tiger has not yet moved; his vast head and flaming green eyes are just visible at the door of the den. The leopard and the bear are still tearing one another. The panther is gradually, stealthily, noiselessly approaching the poor, helpless girl.

Suddenly a fresh, bright-red rose is thrown from the seats above: it is the last earthly greeting, the last farewell token of some old friend--perhaps a brother, perhaps (O G.o.d!) a lover! It falls on the blood-stained sand, shattering itself in perfumed ruin at the maiden's feet.

She starts as the red leaves scatter before her. She advances from the wall, and boldly withdrawing the fragments of her poor, torn veil, looks up into the mighty sea of pitiless visages--looks up with her sweet, childish, cherry-lipped face, and those great, dark, softly sad Roman eyes--to thank him by a last look of love. "Who can it be?"

No one the maiden knows. She only sees a seemingly endless row of cruel and sensual faces, the faces of the wild beast populace of Rome,--the faces which smile at the sight of a living human body, torn limb from limb by lions, and scattered over the sands in crimson shreds of flesh....