Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 6

So that when the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, there comes to you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, "Come!"

So that when the silent night comes,--you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean-sh.o.r.es thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, an ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of that sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and "the city sickening on its own thick breath."

And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the midst of the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea might come upon them in the night, and phantom winds call wildly to them in their sleep, and they might wake to find themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of the breakers.

Sometimes, I doubt not, these swarthy sellers of fruit, whose black eyes sparkle with the sparkle of the sea, and whose voices own the tones of ocean-winds, sicken when a glorious breeze from the Gulf enters the city, shaking the blossoms from the magnolia-trees and the orange-groves.

Sometimes, I doubt not, they forsake their Southern home when the dream comes upon them, and take ship for the Spanish Main. Yet I think most men may wake here from the dreams of the sea, and rest again. It is true that you cannot hear the voice of the h.o.a.ry breakers in the moonlight,--only the long panting of the cotton-presses, the shouting of the boats calling upon each other through the tropical night, and the ceaseless song of night-birds and crickets. But the sea-ships, with their white wings folded, are slumbering at the wharves; the sea-winds are blowing through the moon-lit streets, and from the South arises a wondrous pale glow, like the far reflection of the emerald green of the ocean. So that the Greek sailor, awaking from the vision of winds and waves, may join three fingers of his right hand, after the manner of the Eastern Church, and cross himself, and sleep again in peace.

Hearn left New Orleans in July, 1887, and was soon settled at St.

Pierre, Martinique. His letters to Dr. Matas form the princ.i.p.al sources of information concerning himself and his work during his stay there.

From them I choose a few selections which bear upon his literary labours. At first, of course, all is perfection:

I am absolutely bewitched, and resolved to settle down somewhere in the West Indies. Martinique is simply heaven on earth. You must imagine a community whose only vices are erotic. There are no thieves, no roughs, no sn.o.bs.

Everything is primitive and morally pure--except in the only particular where purity would be out of harmony with natural conditions. As for the climate, it is divine--though this is the worst season.

And I have begun to hate all that is energetic, swift, rapid in thought or action, all rivalry, all compet.i.tion, all striving in the race of success. It is just enough to live here: no, it is too much!--it is more than any ordinary human being deserves to enjoy. It makes one feel like crying for joy just to look about one.

Couldn't I induce you to abandon the beastly civilization of the U. S., and live somewhere down here forever more,--where everybody is honest and good-natured and courteous, and where everything is divine? Man was not intended to work in this part of the world: while you are here, you cannot quite persuade yourself you are awake,--it is a dream of eternal beauty,--all the musky winds, all the flower-months of Paradise! New Orleans is the most infernal hole in the entire Cosmos. Don't live in it! Confound fame and wealth and reputation and splendour. You don't need any of these things here; they are superfluous; they are obsolete; they are nuisances; they are living curses. Settle here. Humming-birds will fly into your chamber to wake you up. What on earth you can find to live for in the U.S. I am now at a loss to see. You'll get old there;--here you will remain eternally young: the palms distil Elixir Vitae.

But it is simply foolishness to write to you--because I can't write about this place. All ambition to write has been paralyzed--let Nature do the writing--in green, azure and gold!

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAFCADIO HEARN. _From a Photograph taken at Martinique, August 24th, 1888._]

(Letter from St. Pierre, July 30, 1887.)

I am not at all sure of my literary future,--I do not mean pecuniarily, for I never allow that question to seriously bother me: to write simply to make money is to be a d----d fraud, so long as one can aim at higher things. But I do not feel the same impulses and inspirations and power to create;--I have been pa.s.sing through a sort of crisis,--out of enthusiasm into reality and I do not feel so mentally strong as I ought. The climate had much to do with it in the beginning, causing a serious weakness of memory;--that is now pa.s.sed; but I feel as if _mon ame avait perdu ses ailes_. Perhaps something healthier and stronger may come of it; but in the meanwhile I suffer from great disquietude, and occasional very black ideas; and praise sounds to me like a malicious joke, because I feel that my work has been d.a.m.nably bad. The fact that I _know_ it has been bad, encourages me to believe I may do better, and find confidence in myself.

I have enough MS. for a volume of French colonial sketches, and do not think I will be able to do much more with Martinique for the present; but I also have acc.u.mulated material out of which something will probably grow. I would now like to attempt some Spanish studies.

Northern air will do me good, though I do not like the idea of living in it. But when, after all this stupid, brutal, never-varying heat, you steam North, and the constellations change, and the moon stands up on her feet instead of lying on her back lasciviously,--and the first grand whiff of cold air comes like the advent of a Ghost,--Lord! how one's brain suddenly clears and thrills into working order. It is like a new soul breathed into your being through the nostrils--after the Creator's fashion of animating his Adam of clay.

Perhaps you think I have been a poor correspondent. You can scarcely imagine the difficulties of maintaining a friendly chat by letter while trying to do literary work here. Most people who attempt literature here either give it up after a short time, or go to the graveyard: there are a few giants,--like Dr. Rufz de Lavison (who never finished his etudes nevertheless), Davey the historian; Dessalles who suddenly disappeared leaving his history incomplete. But I fear I am no giant. At 2 or 2.30 p.m. if you try to write, your head feels as if a heated feather pillow had been stuffed into your skull. To write at all one must utilize the morning;--that is given to make the pot boil: one can write letters only at intervals, paragraph by paragraph, or between solid chapters of downright wearing-out work.

Nevertheless, one learns to love this land so much as to be quite willing to abandon anything and everything to live in it. As in the old Sunday-school hymn, "only man is vile:"

nature and Woman are unspeakably sweet.

I suppose I will not be able to meet you in New York this fall: you will be too busy. Next summer it will be possible, I hope. Perhaps you will have the pleasure of a little book or two from me during the cold weather: I will revise things in New York. It has been a horrible agony to have my stuff printed without being able to see the proofs, and full of mistakes. "Chita" has been a great literary success--contrary to expectation. I find success is not decided by the press, nor by first effect on the public: opinions of literary men count much more, and these have been better than I imagined they could be. (1887)

Well, I am caught! The tropics have me, for better or worse, so long as I live. Life in a great northern city again would be a horror insupportable. Yet I have had great pain here. I have been four months without a cent of money where n.o.body would trust me: you know what that means, if you have ever had a rough-and-tough year or two: otherwise you could not imagine it. I have had disillusions in number. I find worst of all, there is no inspiration in the tropics,--no poetry, no aspiration, no self-sacrifice, no human effort. Now, that I can go where I like, do as I please--for I have won the fight after all,--I still prefer one year of Martinique to a thousand years of New York. What is it? Am I demoralized; or am I simply better informed than before? I don't really know. (1887)

New York, September 29, 1887.[12]

[12] Written during a brief stay in New York, whither he had gone in the fall of 1887.

Dear Friend Matas:--I am going back to the tropics,--probably for many years. My venture has been more successful than I ever hoped; and I find myself able to abandon journalism, with all its pettinesses, cowardices, and selfishnesses, forever. I am able hereafter to devote myself to what you always said was my _forte_: the study of tropical Nature--G.o.d's Nature,--violent, splendid, nude, and pure. I never hoped for such fortune. It has come unasked. I am almost afraid to think it is true. I am afraid to be happy!

_c/o_ Dr. George M. Gould, 119 South Seventeenth St., Philadelphia, June 5, 1889.

Dear Friend Matas:--Your letter of March 21 only reached me to-day, June 5th; but made me very glad to get it. I have been back from the West Indies about three weeks--do not know how long I shall stay. It seemed like tearing my heart out to leave Martinique; and though I am now in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, among dear friends, and with the splendid spectacle before me of man's grandest efforts--not a wild cyclone of electricity and iron like New York, but a great quiet peace--the tropical Nature with all its memories haunts me perpetually,--draws my thought back again over the azure sea and under the turquoise sky to the great palms and the volcanic hills and the beautiful brown women. I know I shall have to go back to the tropics sooner or later.

The effect of the climate, as you know, is deadly to mental work. Physically, however, I felt better in it,--less nervous than I ever was before. Only one's will to work is broken down; and it is better only to collect material there to work up elsewhere. That sort of work I am busy at just now. I have a signed contract for publication of "Chita" in book-form; and the result of my two years' absence will be forthcoming in a volume of larger size.

You know Philadelphia, I suppose, the beautiful city; and I suppose you know that physicians here form the leaders of, and give the tone to, social life. It seems to me but just that they should,--representing the highest intellectual rank of civilization when they are really worthy of the profession.

... As for other people wondering what has become of me; that is just what I want. I do not care to have any one know what I am doing till it is done.... I have happily got over a sort of crisis, however, which isolated me more than I would have liked to be isolated from the world at large: the distrust of myself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HANDWRITING OF HEARN IN 1889. _face page 63._]

Concerning the value of Hearn's Martinique work, I am permitted to quote from a letter written to him on May 24, 1890, by the late Edmund C.

Stedman,--and there could be no better judge and critic:

"I will not leave without telling you how much I am your debtor for the fascinating copious record of your life in the Windward Islands, and for your 'Youma'--both of which I take with me to 'Kelp Rock'--and which we shall know by heart ere long. The 'Two Years' came when I was 'moving'

in New York, etc.,--so that books and letters, unacknowledged, perforce have piled up on my table. I am grateful for your remembrance and your gifts. _No_ book could please me more than your 'Two Years.' Those Islands are my Hesperides--I had begun a series of poems and lyrics, cast in the Caribees, but your prose poems put mine to shame--and I am glad to listen to your music and leave my own unsung."

CHAPTER VI.--"GETTING A SOUL"

SHORT though it was in time, the Philadelphia visit in 1889 has a value long in significance, that deserves epitomization. To begin with, it was Hearn's first experience of anything that might be called home-life. Its result was a softening and normalizing of him both as to character and as to manner, which was most evident. Secondly, and as he chose to put it, I "gave him a soul." By this poetic paraphrase he meant that I had succeeded in bringing to his recognition the existence of Freedom in what he thought determinism;--that intelligence, purpose, and beneficence lie behind biology, and that human beings are not always, and may never be wholly, the slaves of the senses, and the dupes of desire. Beauty itself, which he so widely sought, I asked him to note, is a needless, harmful, and even impossible thing in a world of adamantine logic and necessity. Above all, I demonstrated the existence of Duty, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of G.o.d," not only in the abstract, but in concrete lives, in social and historic exemplifications, and that only by means of men and women who obey conscience is social and historic progress brought about. They who have not seen that can have no "soul;" they who do see it, have soul, durable or great according to the clearness of the seeing and the obedience to the implication. Fully and freely Hearn acknowledged the vision, and never afterward could he be wholly the same as he had been before. But the Providence of the Oriental and semi-barbarous is Improvidence, and their G.o.d is Fate.

Hearn came to hate, or to pretend to hate, the truth which had now slipped through his spiritual eyes, but he could not undo or outroot it entirely; "henceforth by the vision splendid is on his way attended."

Thirdly, this new viewpoint, this new spirit or soul, I got incorporated in a little art-work, or ethical study--"Karma," published in _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890, after Hearn had gone to j.a.pan. To the world and without the knowledge of its making, "Karma" must have seemed an illogical and even impossible thing for Hearn to have written.

It is apparently the sole work which he ever wrote, created _de novo_ and without the data having been found or brought to him from without.

But it was only a seeming creation. It was only the telling, the colouring, that was his, as in his other tales before or after. In our long walks and talks in the Park at night, we wrought out the t.i.tle, the datum, and the whole trend of the story. He rebelled, but I held him to the task, which he finally executed with frank and artistic loyalty. The pride or indifference, even the dislike, of its readers, the writer, or inspirer, is as nothing compared with the fact that by it and from it Hearn learned something of love and duty that had never before been a living reality to him. What an infinite distance it was removed from anything dreamed during the Cincinnati period, or to be derived from Flaubert, Gautier, or Beaudelaire! After that his future work could never be, and never was, what it was from the writing, "_Everything you feel you would not like me to know._" I do not think there is exaggeration of the importance of the story, and what led up to its writing, in saying that it was the greatest of the turning-points in his life, and that directly because of it the magnificent works of the j.a.panese period were profoundly influenced through the att.i.tude of mind thereby gained.

Concerning the heroine of the tale Hearn wrote me:

Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it. It would have to be s.e.xual. Never could find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood, which in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about s.e.x, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect natures inspire a love that is a fear. I don't think any love is n.o.ble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half compa.s.sion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive--pregnant with future pains innumerable.

But, fourthly, that in which I feel as great a pride, is compelling him to go to j.a.pan. Others could have reported for lurid yellow journalism, others might possibly have translated as well as he, others could have told the West Indian stories, but--not even his beloved Lowell--only Hearn could have written of the j.a.panese life and soul as Hearn has done. He had no thought of the journey when I showed him his duty and his opportunity. By argument, pleading, almost compulsion, I at last wearied his opposition, and he went, with reluctance, after months of halting in detested New York City in which he learned by bitter experience that it was no place for him, and that his beloved tropics should not be again sought.

How disappointed he was in his New York friends and prospects may be gathered from the following excerpt taken from one of his letters to me.

I had used all my influence to keep him from a stay in the city. He wrote as follows:

Dear Gooley, your advice is good from your way of looking at it; but I am much stronger in New York than you imagine, and my future in it is plain and perfect sailing if I keep good health. I am only embarra.s.sed for the moment. I am quite a lion here, and could figure in a way you would hardly guess, if I were not such a man of tentacles. I am not afraid of the cold--though it disheartens fancy a little; but I shall leave fancy alone for a while. No, Gooley, dear Gooley, I shall make my way in New York--don't be afraid for me.

He soon became convinced that I was right and finally resumed the journey unwillingly. The end has justified the means and the sacrifices.

It is plain that the j.a.panese period and work crown his life-labours splendidly, and that his masterful pictures of j.a.panese characters, traditions, and religion now const.i.tute one of our most precious literary treasures. They have also been of profound service to j.a.pan.

When he left my home, he, of his own accord, asked me to care for his library, then in the home of Mr. Alden at Metuchen, New Jersey, who two years previously had consented to take charge of it, and had paid shipping expenses, insurance, etc. None can imagine anything ungenerous or unkind in Mr. Alden. An old Cincinnati acquaintance characterizes Hearn's action in the matter as "a swindle." I have no knowledge or hint how it was or could be of that nature. Hearn wrote all the letters, and made all the arrangements to have the books sent to me. Mr. Alden authorizes me to say:

"I was perfectly convinced at the time of the transfer of the library to Dr. Gould that he had no desire for its possession, and that the transfer was made solely in accordance with Mr. Hearn's request. I am quite sure that Dr. Gould fully explained the matter to me at the time.

I feel sure that Dr. Gould acted precisely as I should have done if I had retained possession of the library; that is, readily giving it up to any legitimate claimant." I found the books of no value to me, and they surely have been an expense. I tried, later, to prevail upon Hearn to allow me to ship them to him in j.a.pan, but I never received any replies to my letters. He asked for the catalogue, some of the old books, and beside these, at his request, a number of expensive new books were at various times bought and sent to him. I suspect that as there was not a book on j.a.pan in the collection, and as he had a plethora of data at hand such as he wanted, the library gathered with so much love and enthusiasm was no longer of use to him, especially under the conditions of his life there.

Hearn gained strength and power as regards both truth and art, in so far as he was true to the better in himself; all his trouble and his weakness were born out of the lower self he would not, or could not, sacrifice. His worship of the blood-curdling and revolting gave him some temporary vogue among the readers of yellow newspaperdom, but not until that was renounced for the compromise of the "odd and ghostly" did he begin to show an ability to reach something more worthy in human nature than the degenerate reporter catered to. The next step in advance was the cultivation of the artistic p.o.r.nography of the sensualistic French story-writer. Not until he renounced this did he once more come to the something of more use to the reading world which fills the Martinique epoch. His disinclination to go to j.a.pan, I more than suspect, was owing to a half consciousness that there was in that nation too much civilization, too good character, and even too much religion to suit the tastes which had been uppermost in motiving his past literary labours.

His going into utter, illogical, and absurd captivity to the atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer was a sorry sacrifice of his n.o.bler office and better destiny to the fate that relentlessly dogged his footsteps. He was forced into all the humanity and beneficence possible to him by j.a.panese restraint, art, and truth. His cries of disillusion over the j.a.panese were largely the anger of the semi-barbaric wanderer held by family ties, paternity, etc., when he found himself prevented from again seeking the faraway tropical pseudo-paradises of peoples but one remove from savagery.

In the pre-j.a.panese periods only the lurid, the monstrous, the enormous, only hot crime, and s.e.xual pa.s.sion, could excite his liveliest interest, and all great literature was as much ignored as if it did not exist.