Lafcadio Hearn Part 9

The routine of his life at this time is given in letters written to his "old Dad" and his friend, Krehbiel.

The same ascetic scorn for material comfort, heritage of his oriental ancestry, seems to have distinguished him at this period in New Orleans, as later in j.a.pan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the office, "concocting devilment" for the _Item_, his Spanish lessons with Jose de Jesus y Preciado, the "peripatetic blasphemy," as he named him afterwards, dinner at a Chinese restaurant for an infinitesimal sum, an hour or two spent at second-hand book-stalls, and home to bed. There is, I am told, an individual, Armand Hawkins by name, owner of an ancient book-store at New Orleans, still alive, who remembers the curious little genius, with his prominent eyes, wonderful knowledge on all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects recounted in a soft, musical voice, who used to come almost daily to visit his book-store. He it was who enabled Hearn to get together the library about which there has been so much discussion since his death. Next to his love of buying old books, Hearn's great indulgence seems to have been smoking, not cigars, but pipes of every make and description.

The glimpses we get of him from his own letters and from reminiscences collected from various people in New Orleans all give the same impression. A Bohemian love of vagabondage, picking up impressions here and there, some of which were set down in pencil, some in ink; as far as his eyesight would permit, many were the sketches made at this time.

None of them have been preserved, except the very clever Mephistophelian one sent to Mr. Watkin and reproduced in the volume ent.i.tled "Letters from the Raven." "He was a gifted creature," says a lady who knew him at this time. "He came fluttering in and out of our house like a shy moth, and was adored by my children."

He had no ambitions, no loves, no anxieties, sometimes a vague unrest without a motive, sometimes a feeling as if his heart were winged and trying to soar; sometimes a half-crazy pa.s.sion for a great night with wine and women and music; but the wandering pa.s.sion was strongest of all, and he felt no inclination to avail himself of the only anchor which keeps the ship of a man's life in port.... Nights were so liquid with tropic moonlight, days so splendid with green and gold, summer so languid with perfume and warmth, that he hardly knew whether he was dreaming or awake.

In 1881, Hearn succeeded in becoming a member of the staff of the leading New Orleans paper, the _Times Democrat_, "the largest paper," he tells his sister, "in the Southern States." He now seemed to have entered on a halcyon period of life--congenial society, romantic and interesting surroundings. Penetrated with enthusiasm for the modern French literary school as he was, he here met intellects and temperaments akin to his own. Now he was enabled to get his translations from Gautier and Baudelaire printed, and read for the first time by an appreciative public. "Everybody was kind," he tells his sister; "I became well and strong, lived steadily, spent my salary on books. I was thus able to make up for my deficiencies of education.... I had only a few hours of work each day;--plenty of time to study. I wrote novels and other books which literary circles approved of."

With Page Baker, the owner and editor-in-chief of the _Times Democrat_, he formed a salutary and enduring friendship. The very difference in character between the two seems to have made the bond all the more enduring. Page Baker was a man of great business capacity, and at the same time keen discrimination in literary affairs. From the first he conceived the highest opinion of Hearn's literary ability. However fantastic or out-of-the-way his contributions to the columns of the _Times Democrat_, they were always inserted without elision. Years afterwards, writing to him from j.a.pan, Hearn declares, in answer to a panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his j.a.panese books, that the most delightful criticisms he ever had were Page Baker's own readings aloud of his vagaries in the "_T. D._" office, after the proofs came down, just fresh from the composition room, with the wet, sharp, inky smell still on the paper. Baker, apparently, in 1893 sent him substantial help, and Hearn writes thanking him from the bottom of his much-scarified heart. Often amidst the cramped, austere conditions of his existence in j.a.pan, he recalled these days of communion with congenial spirits at New Orleans, and work with his colleagues at the _Times Democrat_ office. "Ghosts! After getting your letter last night I dreamed. Do you remember that splendid Creole who used to be your city editor--John----?--is it not a sin that I have forgotten his name? He sat in a big chair in the old office, and told me wonderful things, which I could not recall on waking."

In a letter dated July 7, 1882, Hearn tells Mr. Watkin that he had entered into an arrangement with Worthington, the publisher, for the issuing of his translation of Gautier's stories made at Cincinnati. It was to cost him one hundred and fifty dollars, but there was an understanding that this money was to be repaid by royalties on the sale of the book and any extra profits. He announced his intention of going North in a few months by way of Cincinnati, as he wished to see Worthington about his new publication. Though he was making, he said, the respectable wage of thirty dollars a week for five hours' work a day, he felt enervated by the climate, incapable of any long stretch of work, and thought change to a northern climate for a bit might stimulate his intellectual powers. He then touched on the changes that pa.s.sing years had wrought in his outlook on life. "Less despondent, but less hopeful; wiser a little and more silent; less nervous, but less merry; ... not strictly economical, but coming to it steadily." His horizons were widening, the accomplishment of a fixed purpose in life was really the only pleasurable experience, and the grasp of a friendly hand the only real satisfaction of an existence that wisdom declared a delusion and a snare.

Hearn at times indulged in exaggerated fits of economy, the one thought that animated him being the idea of freeing himself from the yoke of dependence on the whims of employers--from the harness of journalism. He made up his mind to keep house for himself, so hired a room in the northern end of the French quarter, and purchased a complete set of cooking utensils and kitchen ware. He succeeded in reducing his expenses to two dollars a week, and kept them at that (exclusive of rent), although his salary rose to thirty dollars a week. Having saved a respectable sum, he formed the fantastical idea of trying to keep a restaurant, run on the lines of the cheap Spanish and Chinese restaurants he had been wont to frequent. "Business--ye Antiquities"; hard, practical business! he told Krehbiel; honourable, respectable business, but devoid of dreamful illusions. "Alas, this is no world for dreaming."

The venture ended as might have been expected. Hearn had not inherited the commercial instincts of his ancestors who sold oil and wine in the Ionian Islands; his partner robbed him of all the money he had invested, and decamped, leaving him saddled with the restaurant and a considerable number of debts. A swindling building society seems to have absorbed the rest of his savings.

After these two catastrophes the little man became almost comically terrified at financial enterprise of any kind, even the investment of money in dividend-paying concerns. When Captain Mitch.e.l.l McDonald later, in j.a.pan, endeavoured to induce him to put his money into various lucrative concerns, Hearn declared that he would prefer to lose everything he owned than submit to the worry of investing it. The mere idea of business was "a horror, a nightmare, a torture unspeakable."

Though apparently only journalising and translating, Hearn was piling up experiences and sensations, not making use of them except in letters, but laying down the concrete and setting the foundation for his work in the West Indies and j.a.pan. "The days come and go like m.u.f.fled and veiled figures sent from a friendly, distant party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away."

Emerson did not take into account those apparently infertile periods in an artist's life, when the days come and go, but though they pa.s.s silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their pa.s.sage unproductive. How invaluable, for instance, was Hearn's study of Creole proverbs for his "Two Years in the French West Indies." How invaluable for his interpretation of the Orient were the studies he undertook for "Strange Leaves from Strange Literature," and his six small adaptations ent.i.tled "Chinese Ghosts."

After several refusals "Stray Leaves" was accepted for publication by Osgood. He thus announced the fact to his friend Krehbiel:--

"DEAR K. (Private),

"'Stray Leaves,' etc., have been accepted by James R. Osgood and Co.

Congratulate your little Dreamer of Monstrous Dreams,

"Aschadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah,

"Bismillah, "Allah-hu-akbar."

The book was dedicated to "Page M. Baker, Editor of the New Orleans _Times Democrat_."

This series of small sketches is typical of the clarity of language and purity of thought that invariably distinguish Hearn's work; but it lacks the realism, the keenness of _choses vues_, so characteristic of his j.a.panese sketches. There is none of the haunting, moving tragedy and ghostliness, the spiritual imagination and introspection of "Kokoro" or the "Exotics." Though polished and scholarly, showing refinement in the use of words, the interest is remote and visionary, permeated here and there also with a certain amount of Celtic sentimentality, a "Tommy Moore" flavour, somewhat too saccharine in quality. The one, for instance, called "Boutimar" treats of a very hackneyed subject, the offering of the water of youth, and life without end, to Solomon, and the sage's refusal, because of the remembrance suggested by Boutimar that he would outlive children, friends and all whom he loved; therefore "Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond dew of the heart, which is tears."

"Chinese Ghosts," though distinguished also by that _soigneux_ flavour that gives a slightly artificial impression, holds far more the distinctive flavour of Hearn's genius. His own soul is written into the legend of "Pu the potter." "Convinced that a soul cannot be divided, Pu entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for the soul of his Vase."

By the publication of the "Letters from the Raven" we are enabled to push those to Krehbiel, published by Miss Bisland, into place, and a.s.sign fairly accurate dates to each of them. He tells Mr. Watkin that he was six months before finding a fixed residence. In August, 1878, he writes inviting him to come in the autumn to pay him a visit, and telling him of delightful rooms with five large windows opening on piazzas, shaded by banana-trees. This apparently is the house in St.

Louis Street, which he describes to Krehbiel. Miss Bisland places it almost at the beginning of the series, but it must have been written at a considerably later period. How picturesque and vivid is his description! With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway, with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a h.o.a.ry dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball,"

with its five windows and gla.s.s doors opening flush with the floor and rising to the ceiling.

Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw, but an immaterial and spiritual world as well.

CHAPTER XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

"Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem strange in words, appears very strange upon paper."

Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed, for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles, his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity.

To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work.

Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion, especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument; these he would leave later on Gould's study table.

To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour.

Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature, inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being egotistical. His att.i.tude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, pa.s.sed amongst an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought; his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of spirit--perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding him--a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted country. The j.a.panese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of remarkable picturesqueness and reality.

The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the world.

Many of the most characteristic pa.s.sages have necessarily, therefore, been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories, incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all, in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are addressed.

It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever cometh.'"

He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting t.i.tles, publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist, he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do ill.u.s.trations for her magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable."

Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a particle of literary jealousy in his composition.

To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical.

You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think."

Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitch.e.l.l McDonald not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others would reach the same standard.

In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College.

He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he says, after one of these pa.s.sages of good advice. Putting jesting on one side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose.

In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little man's personal prejudices were certainly too p.r.o.nounced to make his a trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic theories that const.i.tute the charm of his letters. You feel as though you were pa.s.sing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape.

You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical pa.s.sage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude, others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this pa.s.sage the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries, freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen.

Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated j.a.pan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty, all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that voice; and the old first love of j.a.pan and of things j.a.panese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14]

[14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Sh.e.l.ley, having learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson, Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at k.u.mamoto ent.i.tled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century,"

because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" reminded him of Miss Bisland. He p.r.o.nounced Matthew Arnold to be "one of the colossal humbugs of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and an unutterably dreary essayist,"

because at the moment he was animated by one of his intense enthusiasms for _Edwin_ Arnold, whose acquaintance Hearn had made during one of Arnold's visits to j.a.pan. "Far the n.o.bler man and writer, permeated with the beauties of strong faiths and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in some happier era, may bless mankind with the universal religion in perfect harmony with the truths of science, and the better nature of humanity."

But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique or partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpa.s.sed, here and there expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when pa.s.sing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of phosph.o.r.escence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are shimmering, a ma.s.s of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the dullest subjects--writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the subject of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain force, he suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and Shintoism.

"There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and race feeling. I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a Polish brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells the story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still under the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least murmur,--'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands fell, but the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At last, old Steinmetz gave a signal--_the_ signal. The bugles rang out with the force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air forbidden ever to be sung or heard at other times--the national air (you know it)--'_No!

Poland is not dead_!' And with that crash of bra.s.s all that lives of the brigade was hurled at the French batteries. Mechanical power, if absolutely irresistible, might fling back such a charge, but no human power. For old Steinmetz had made the mightiest appeal to those 'Polish brutes' that man, G.o.d, or devil could make, the appeal to the ghost of the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a thousand years."

Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some everyday subject; in the next paragraph an a.s.sociation of ideas, connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely recounted:--

"'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous, audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in my heart still."