Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 3

Suddenly a terrible yet friendly eye meets and rivets the gaze of her own--an eye keen and coldly-blue as a blade of steel. A sternly handsome Northern face it is, with flowing yellow hair. For an instant the iron lips seem to soften in a smile of pity, and the keen blue eyes become brighter. So do the soft dark ones they meet in that piteous farewell.

She has found her unknown friend.

... A crash--a fierce growl--a faint, helpless cry--a spray of warm, bright blood.

"Ah, Caius! you've lost your hundred sesterces. The Fates are against you to-day!"

"Curse the Fates! Did you see the fool who threw her the rose?"

"That great tall t.i.tan of a fellow, with the yellow hair?"

"Yes. That's the Goth."

"What! the gladiator who killed the lions?"

"The same who won his freedom this morning. See! the fool's wiping his eyes now. These Goths can fight like Hercules, but they whine like sick women when a girl is hurt. They think up in the North that women are to be worshipped like the immortal G.o.ds. I wish they'd make the great red-headed brute go down and kill that cursed tiger!"

Hearn's single contribution to the last number of the fated _Giglampz_ was a four-column retelling of "the weird story of Loki's evil children from the strange folk-lore of Ancient Scandinavia."

It was thus blood, sensualism and fiendishness that still aroused Hearn's interest when not only not compelled to the choice, but when they were contraindicated and wholly illogical. But it was all a little less revolting, less real, more artistic, than the tan-yard reporting, and it was drawn from more remote sources. Mr. Henderson suggests the same when he writes:

"But it was not in this slavery for a living even to crush out of him the determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of perhaps columns, in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and ma.n.u.script, translating 'One of Cleopatra's Nights.' ...

"An Oriental warmth and glow pervaded him. While his lines were hard ones in the grime and soot and trying weather of Cincinnati, from which his frail body shrank continually, his trend of thought was largely tropical. Perhaps he saw beyond the dusky faces, rolling eyes and broad noses of the people of the Cincinnati levee, the mixed people of the West Indies and the beautiful little ones of j.a.pan, with whom he was destined to live before long. However that may be, his greatest pleasure, after a translation from Gautier or an original tragedy where he could in his masterful way use his vocabulary of the gruesome, was to study and absorb the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, as he found it in Cincinnati and New Orleans, and to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study. Things that were common to these people in their everyday life, his vivid imagination transformed into a subtle melody of romance. The distant booming upon the midnight air of a river steamer's whistle was for him the roustabout's call to his waiting mistress at the landing, and his fruitful pen drew the picture of their watching and coming and meeting."

The words _indolent and sensuous life_ are also significant. The tropics, their fatalism and the kind of life there lived were drawing him with secret but irresistible force. Now begins to mix with and mollify the gruesome a softer element, also Oriental, or what is much the same thing, tropical--sympathy with and study of the simple and unlettered, those who are the improvident slaves of fate, thoughtless impulse or heedless desire. To them, as we shall see, Hearn's mind turned more and more. His was essentially an Oriental mind and heart, an exotic weed (and weeds may become the loveliest of flowers) dropped by some migrating bird upon the strange crabbed soil of the crudest of Occidentalism. Never did Hearn stop yearning for the warmth, the fatalism and the laziness of tropic semi-barbarism. The gruesome was not being killed, but was being modified and tamed by civilization.

Hearn had been discharged from the _Commercial_, where his salary was $25 a week, "on an ethical point of policy which need not be discussed here. The _Commercial_ took him on at $22." Judge M. F. Wilson, of Cincinnati, tells me that his discharge was caused by his seeking a licence for and an open marriage with a coloured woman. The licence was refused, because illegal at that time. The law was repealed a little later. The marriage did not take place.[9]

[9] Mr. George Mortimer Roe, at that time a friend of Hearn, now living at Long Beach, California, writes me: "Hearn was quite persistent in his efforts to persuade me to a.s.sist him in getting the licence, but I told him I could not aid him in his ambition to be guilty of miscegenation. For many years we had been the best of friends, but from that time on he always avoided me, scarcely speaking to me if by accident we did meet."

Mr. Henderson continues thus:

"As Hearn advanced in his power to write, the sense of the discomforts of his situation in Cincinnati grew upon him. His body and mind longed for the congeniality of southern air and scenes. One morning, after the usual hard work of an unusually nasty winter night in Cincinnati, in a leisure hour of conversation, he heard an a.s.sociate on the paper describe a scene in a Gulf State. It was something about a grand old mansion of an antebellum cotton prince, with its great white columns, its beautiful private drive down to the public road, whitewashed negro-quarters stretching away in the background, in the distance some cypress and live-oaks and Spanish moss, and close by a grove of magnolias with their delightful odours and the melody of mocking-birds in the early sunlight. Hearn took in every word of this, though he had little to say at the time, with great keenness of interest, as shown by the dilation of his nostrils. It was as though he could see and hear and smell the delights of the scene. Not long after this, on leaving Cincinnati for New Orleans, he remarked: 'I have lost my loyalty to this paper, and change was inevitable. Perhaps it isn't so much the lack of opportunity here or a lack of appreciation of a.s.sociations as this beastly climate. I seem to shrivel up in this alternation of dampness, heat and cold. I had to go sooner or later, but it was your description of the sunlight and melodies and fragrance and all the delights with which the South appeals to the senses that determined me. I shall feel better in the South and I believe I shall do better.'"

Some of his Cincinnati acquaintances speak of his obsequious, even fawning, manner ("timid and feline of approach," says Henderson), of his "washing his hands with invisible water"--characteristics not dictated by the parentage ascribed to him, not consonant with his photographs, and not wholly with his gruesome traits. He wore heavy myopic spectacles at this time, not to see (because they were wholly discarded later), but probably in order not to be seen--_i.e._ to hide the double deformity of his eyes. One must remember that with or without spectacles the world a foot or two away was much of a mystery to Hearn, and that one fears a surely existent and near-by mystery. One approaches it or comes within its power with doubt, dislike and caution. The play of facial expression was not to be seen by Hearn. All Uriah Heeps may not be myopic, but all highly myopic persons will have slow, stealthy, careful, even catlike att.i.tudes and manners; every step they take must be done with hesitation, bowed head and great care, in order not to fall or stumble against something. The wholly blind walk with more decision and quickness. Of course this slow, soft carefulness of manner, "the velvet feline step," was Hearn's all his life. It followed inexorably that, though possessed of a healthy and athletic body, there was possible for him no athletics which required accuracy of sight or sequent precision and celerity of movement. That with good eyes he would have been an utterly different man in character and in literature, is as certain as that he would have had a very different manner, movement and style of physical existence. With good eyes he would have been strong, athletic, bold, as is admirably ill.u.s.trated by the fact that in the single sport in which little vision was required--swimming--he was most expert, and that he enjoyed this exercise to the fullest degree.

To scale a steeple in order to describe the city from that unusual point of view was a task worthy of yellow journalism which cared little for accuracy but much for "scare" headlines. Hearn saw little or nothing of the city, of course.

The only letters written during the Cincinnati period, known to exist, are those of 1876, called, "Letters to a Lady," published in the volume, _Letters from the Raven_, Milton Bronner, editor.[10] One other work, the origins of which date from this period, is "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and with this is demonstrated the beginning of the influence of the modern French school of story-writers. Hearn was tiring of the worst brutality and coa.r.s.eness of Occidentalism, and seeking a way to the true home of his mind. The ghastly must become the ghostly. The Frenchman's art was to become his half-way house.

[10] Brentano's, 1907.

CHAPTER IV.--THE NEW ORLEANS TIME

I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it to a morbid degree. Any place rather than Cincinnati would have been better for the happiness and success of the emigrating boy, but his relatives had ridded themselves of the burden by a.s.senting to his wish.

Excepting that to j.a.pan, the only sensible move he made was from Cincinnati toward the tropics, to the half-way house thither--New Orleans. The desire to seek the _au dela_ was present, his friends tell me, throughout the stay in Cincinnati. Perhaps the single city in the world which would satisfy his dream more nearly than could any other, was New Orleans. Being psychologically for the most part of degenerate Latin stock, and especially of the French variety, with the requisite admixture of exotic and tropical barbarism; bathed, but not cooked, in the hot and brilliant sunshine he loved and hated; touched and energized by too little Teutonic blood and influence, New Orleans offered to the unhappy man the best possible surroundings for the growth of his talents. Adding to this fortunate concensus of circ.u.mstance and partly a corollary of it was the most fortunate of all accidents that could have occurred to him--that is, the existence of a daily newspaper such as the _Times-Democrat_; of a paying ma.s.s of subscribers relishing Hearn's translations from the most artistic French writers of the short-story; and, most important of all, the presence on the bridge of the n.o.ble Captain of the Newspaper enterprise, the veteran editor, Mr. Page M.

Baker. One shudders to think what would have been Hearn's later career had it not been for the guidance and help of this wise, sympathetic and magnanimous friend. For the one thing needed by Hearn in those who would be his friends rather than their own was magnanimity. It was his frequent misfortune in life to come under the influence of those as incapable of true unselfishness and real kindness as it was natural for them to be cunning and to use an a.s.sumed friendship for hidden flatteries and purposes of their own. Most of these would not have dreamed of a.s.sociating with the man for any reason other than to stand in the reflected light of his literary fame. Most of them had as little care for his poetic prose, and as little appreciation or knowledge of good literature as they had of "the enc.l.i.tic _de_." They had no magnanimity, only wile instead of it. As Hearn was also deprived of large-mindedness in all affairs of the world, he was unhappily p.r.o.ne to accept the offered bribe. He wanted above all things to be flattered and to do as his imperious impulses and weak will suggested. Any one who recognized these things in him and seconded the follies, remained his permitted "friend," but those who withstood them in the least and ran counter to his morbid trends and resolves--these were speedily "dropped," and insulted or grieved to silence. If they had magnanimity, they bore with the man in pity and answered his insults with kind words and kinder deeds. They recognized that they were responsible not to the man but to the carrier of a great talent, and although they might not forget, they gladly forgave, if possibly they might speed him on his predestined way.

Of this number was Baker. Directly or indirectly through him, came a long and happy period of life; came the congenial, educating work, without slavery, of the translations and other easy reportorial services. Of equal importance were the financial rewards. Before and after the New Orleans time not the least of Hearn's misfortunes was his intolerable and brutalizing improvidence and impecuniousness. Under Baker's friendship he came to what for such a person was affluence and independence. He found leisure to read and study and think outside of the journalistic pale, and better still, perhaps,--better to his thinking, at least--he secured the means to indulge his life-long desire for curious and out-of-the-way books. During this time it grew to consciousness with him that in everything, except as regards his beloved Art, he had a little learned to recognize the worth of money.

But within him grew ever stronger the plague of the unsatisfied, the sting of unrest, and he was compelled to obey. In a letter to me from Martinique, after he had recognized his mistake, he admits and explains as follows:

I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of the intellectual life are all lacking here,--no libraries, no books in any language;--a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for months.

But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more daily,--that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish things,--that life is very sweet without them;--and you actually find yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for life in the North are all madness,--that they wasted years which might have been delightfully dozed away in a land where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot.

I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a while,--a short while, probably;--but I do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become tired of places,--or at least of the disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,--the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;--and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repet.i.tion;--yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,--an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,--in the nervous centres of the world's activity. One feels it least, I imagine, in the tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to do:--To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;--to keep it requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it in very short order.

I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went to Demerara and visited the lesser West Indies in July and August of last year,--returned to New York after three months with some MS.,--sold it,--felt very unhappy at the idea of staying in New York, where I had good offers,--suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics by the same steamer that had brought me. I had no commission, resolved to trust to magazine-work. So far I have just been able to sc.r.a.pe along;--the climate numbs mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for won't come.

The real--surpa.s.sing imagination--whelms the ideal out of sight and hearing. The world is young here,--not old and wise and grey as in the North; and one must not seek the Holy Ghost in it. I suspect that the material furnished by the tropics can only be utilized in a Northern atmosphere.

We will talk about it together.

That he never thought to return to New Orleans is demonstrated by the fact that when he left, he shipped his books to another good friend and great editor, Mr. Alden, to keep for him. When he came to the United States in 1889, he fully intended returning to some tropical land. But it was otherwise ordered, and most fortunately, for a year or two more of life under such conditions would have killed both mind and body.

Upon Hearn's arrival in New Orleans, he began sending a series of charming letters to the Cincinnati _Commercial_, signed "Ozias Midwinter."[11] They are, indeed, exquisite, and as certainly of a delicacy and beauty which must have made the reader of that time and newspaper wonder what strange sort of a correspondent the editor had secured. The first letter was about Memphis, pa.s.sed on his way South. I cite some parts to show how the gruesome was merging into or being supplanted by something larger and better, and also to ill.u.s.trate Hearn's growing interest in colours.

[11] Kindly secured by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, Ohio, from a friend and lent to me.

The stranger, however, is apt to leave Memphis with one charming recollection of the place--the remembrance of the sunset scene from the bluffs across the river over Arkansas. I do not think that any part of the world can offer a more unspeakably beautiful spectacle to the traveller than what he may witness any fair evening from those rugged old bluffs at Memphis. The first time I saw it the day had been perfectly bright and clear,--the blue of the sky was unclouded by the least fleecy stain of white cloud; and the sun descended in the west,--not in a yellow haze, or a crimson fog, but with the splendour of his fiery glory almost undimmed. He seemed to leave no trace of his bright fires behind him; and the sky-blue began to darken into night-purple from the east almost immediately. I thought at first it was one of the least romantic sunsets I had ever seen. It was not until the stars were out, and the night had actually fallen, that I beheld the imperial magnificence of that sunset.

I once thought, when sailing up the Ohio one bright Northern summer, that the world held nothing more beautiful than the scenery of the Beautiful River--those voluptuous hills with their sweet feminine curves, the elfin gold of that summer haze, and the pale emerald of the river's verdure-reflecting breast. But even the loveliness of the Ohio seemed faded, and the Northern sky-blue palely cold, like the tint of iceberg pinnacles, when I beheld for the first time the splendour of the Mississippi.

"You must come on deck early to-morrow," said the kind Captain of the _Thompson Dean_; "we are entering the Sugar Country."

So I saw the sun rise over the cane-fields of Louisiana.

It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its setting at Memphis, but of another colour;--an auroral flush of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests of cocoanut palms. Then the day broke gently and slowly--a day too vast for a rapid dawn--a day that seemed deep as s.p.a.ce. I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a vaulted church-roof beside that sky--a sky so softly beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite.

And the giant river broadened to a mile--smooth as a mirror, still and profound as a mountain lake. Between the vastness of the sky and the vastness of the stream, we seemed moving suspended in the midst of day, with only a long, narrow tongue of land on either side breaking the brightness. Yet the horizon never became wholly blue. The green-golden glow lived there all through the day; it was brightest in the south. It was so tropical, that glow;--it seemed of the Pacific, a glow that forms a background to the sight of lagoons and coral reefs and "lands where it is always afternoon."

Below this glow gleamed another golden green, the glory of the waving cane-fields beyond the trees. Huge sugar-mills were breathing white and black clouds into the sky, as they masticated their mighty meal; and the smell of saccharine sweetness floated to us from either sh.o.r.e. Then we glided by miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls; and by the mouths of broad bayous;--past swamps dark with cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient trees;--past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot through with gold. The magnificent old mansions of the Southern planters, built after a generous fashion unknown in the North, with broad verandas and deliciously cool porches, and all painted white or perhaps a pale yellow, looked out grandly across the water from the hearts of shadowy groves; and, like villages of a hundred cottages, the negro quarters dotted the verdant face of the plantation with far-gleaming points of snowy whiteness.

And still that wondrous glow brightened in the south, like a far-off reflection of sunlight on the Spanish Main.

"But it does not look now as it used to in the old slave days," said the pilot, as he turned the great wheel. "The swamps were drained, and the plantations were not overgrown with cottonwood; and somehow or other the banks usen't to cave in then as they do now."

I saw indeed signs of sad ruin on the face of the great plantations; there were splendid houses crumbling to decay, and whole towns of tenantless cabins; estates of immense extent were lying almost unfilled, or with only a few acres under cultivation; and the vigorous cottonwood trees had shot up in whole forests over fields once made fertile by the labour of ten thousand slaves. The scene was not without its melancholy; it seemed tinged by the reflection of a glory pa.s.sed away--the glory of wealth, and the magnificence of wealth; of riches and the luxury of riches.

O fair paradise of the South, if still so lovely in thy ruin, what must thou have been in the great day of thy greatest glory!