The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 12

Yours a jamais, L. HEARN.

TO H. E. KREHBIEL

NEW ORLEANS, 1877.

"O-ME-TAW-BOODH!"--Have I not indeed been much bewitched by thine exotic comedy, which hath the mild perfume and yellow beauty of a Chinese rose?

a.s.suredly I have been enchanted by the Eastern fragrance of thy many-coloured brochure; for mine head "is not as yellow as mud." In thy next epistle, however, please to enlighten my soul in regard to the mystic t.i.tle-phrase,--"Remodelled from the original English;" for I have been wearing out the iron shoes of patience in my vain endeavour to comprehend it. What I most desired, while perusing the play, was that I might have been able to hear the musical interludes,--the barbaric beauty of the melodies,--and the plaintive sadness of thy serpent-skinned instruments. I shall soon return the MSS. to thy hands.

By the bye, did you ever hear a _real_ Chinese gong? I don't mean a d--d hotel gong, but one of those great moon-disks of yellow metal which have so terrible a power of utterance. A gentleman in Bangor, North Wales, who had a private museum of South Pacific and Chinese curiosities, exhibited one to me. It was hanging amidst Fiji spears beautifully barbed with shark's teeth, which, together with grotesque New Zealand clubs of green stone and Sandwich Island paddles wrought with the baroque visages of the Shark-G.o.d, were depending from the walls. Also there were Indian elephants in ivory, carrying b.a.l.l.s in their carven bellies, each ball containing many other b.a.l.l.s inside it. The gong glimmered pale and huge and yellow, like the moon rising over a Southern swamp. My friend tapped its ancient face with a m.u.f.fled drumstick, and it commenced to sob, like waves upon a low beach. He tapped it again, and it moaned like the wind in a mighty forest of pines. Again, and it commenced to roar, and with each tap the roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like thunder rolling over an abyss in the Cordilleras, or the crashing of Thor's chariot wheels. It was awful, and astonishing as awful. I a.s.sure you I did not laugh at it at all. It impressed me as something terrible and mysterious. I vainly sought to understand how that thin, thin disk of trembling metal could produce so frightful a vibration. He informed me that it was very expensive, being chiefly made of the most precious metals,--silver and gold.

Let me give you a description of my new residence. I never knew what the beauty of an old Creole home was until now. I do not believe one could find anything more picturesque outside of Venice or Florence. For six months I had been trying to get a room in one of these curious buildings; but the rents seemed to me maliciously enormous. However, I at last obtained one for $3 per week. Yet it is on the third floor, rear building;--these old princes of the South built always double edifices, covering an enormous s.p.a.ce of ground, with broad wings, courtyards, and slave quarters.

The building is on St. Louis Street, a street several hundred years old.

I enter by a huge archway about a hundred feet long,--full of rolling echoes, and commencing to become verdant with a thin growth of bright moss. At the end, the archway opens into a court. There are a few graceful bananas here with their giant leaves splitting in ribbons in the summer sun, so that they look like young palms. Lord! How the carriages must have thundered under that archway and through the broad paved court in the old days. The stables are here still; but the blooded horses are gone, and the family carriage, with its French coat of arms, has disappeared. There is only a huge wagon left to crumble to pieces. A h.o.a.ry dog sleeps like a stone sphinx at a corner of the broad stairway; and I fancy that in his still slumbers he might be dreaming of a Creole master who went out with Beauregard or Lee and never came back again.

Wonder if the great greyhound is waiting for him.

The dog never notices me. I am not of his generation, and I creep quietly by lest I might disturb his dreams of the dead South. I go up the huge stairway. At every landing a vista of broad archways reechoes my steps--archways that once led to rooms worthy of a prince. But the rooms are now cold and cheerless and vast with emptiness. Tinted in pale green or yellow, with a ceiling moulded with Renaissance figures in plaster, the ghost of luxury and wealth seems trying to linger in them.

I pa.s.s them by, and taking my way through an archway on the right, find myself on a broad piazza, at the end of which is my room.

It is vast enough for a Carnival ball. Five windows and gla.s.s doors open flush with the floor and rise to the ceilings. They open on two sides upon the piazza, whence I have a far view of tropical gardens and ma.s.ses of building, half-ruined but still magnificent. The walls are tinted pale orange colour; green curtains drape the doors and windows; and the mantelpiece, surmounted by a long oval mirror of Venetian pattern, is of white marble veined like the bosom of a Naiad. In the centre of the huge apartment rises a bed as ma.s.sive as a fortress, with tremendous columns of carved mahogany supporting a curtained canopy at the height of sixteen feet. It seems to touch the ceiling, yet it does not. There is no carpet on the floor, no pictures on the wall,--a sense of something dead and lost fills the place with a gentle melancholy;--the breezes play fantastically with the pallid curtains, and the breath of flowers ascends into the chamber from the verdant gardens below. Oh, the silence of this house, the perfume, and the romance of it. A beautiful young Frenchwoman appears once a day in my neighbourhood to arrange the room; but she comes like a ghost and disappears too soon in the recesses of the awful house. I would like to speak with her, for her lips drop honey, and her voice is richly sweet like the cooing of a dove. "O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret hiding-places of the stairs, let me see thy face, let me hear thy voice, for thy voice is sweet and thy countenance is comely!"

Let me tell thee, O Bard of the Harp of a Thousand Strings, concerning a Romance of Georgia. I heard of it among the flickering shadow of steamboat smoke and the flapping of sluggish sails. It has a hero greater, I think, than Bludso; but his name is lost. At least it is lost in Southern history; yet perhaps it may be recorded on the pages of a great book whose leaves never turn yellow with Time, and whose letters are eternal as the stars. But the reason his name is not known is because he was a "d--d n.i.g.g.e.r."

TO H. E. KREHBIEL

NEW ORLEANS, 1878.

MY DEAR MUSICIAN,--I wrote you such a shabby, disjointed letter last week that I feel I ought to make up for it,--especially after your newsy, fresh, pleasant letter to me, which came like a cool Northern breeze speaking of life, energy, success, and strong hopes.

I am very much ashamed that I have not yet been able to keep all my promises to you. There is that Creole music I had hoped to get copied by Sat.u.r.day, and could not succeed in obtaining. But it is only delayed, I a.s.sure you; and New Orleans is going to produce a treat for you soon.

George Cable, a charming writer, some of whose dainty New Orleans stories you may have read in _Scribner's Monthly_, is writing a work containing a study of Creole music, in which the songs are given, with the musical text in footnotes. I have helped Cable a little in collecting the songs; but he has the advantage of me in being able to write music by ear. Scribner will publish the volume. This is not, of course, for publicity.

My new journalistic life may interest you,--it is so different from anything in the North. I have at last succeeded in getting right into the fantastic heart of the French quarter, where I hear the antiquated dialect all day long. Early in the morning I visit a restaurant, where I devour a plate of figs, a cup of black coffee, a dish of cream-cheese,--not the Northern stuff, but a delightful cake of pressed milk floating in cream,--a couple of corn m.u.f.fins, and an egg. This is a heavy breakfast here, but costs only about twenty-five cents. Then I slip down to the office, and rattle off a couple of leaders on literary or European matters and a few paragraphs based on telegraphic news. This occupies about an hour. Then the country papers,--half French, half English,--altogether barbarous, come in from all the wild, untamed parishes of Louisiana. Madly I seize the scissors and the paste-pot and construct a column of crop-notes. This occupies about half an hour. Then the New York dailies make their appearance. I devour their substance and take notes for the ensuing day's expression of opinion. And then the work is over, and the long golden afternoon welcomes me forth to enjoy its perfume and its laziness. It would be a delightful existence for one without ambition or hope of better things. On Sunday the brackish Lake Pontchartrain offers the attraction of a long swim, and I like to avail myself of it. Swimming in the Mississippi is dangerous on account of great fierce fish, the alligator-gars, which attack a swimmer with ferocity. An English swimmer was bitten by one only the other day in the river, and, losing his presence of mind, was swept under a barge and drowned.

Folks here tell me now that I have been sick I have nothing more to fear, and will soon be acclimatized. If acclimatization signifies becoming a bundle of sharp bones and saddle-coloured parchment, I have no doubt of it at all. It is considered dangerous here to drink much water in summer. For five cents one can get half a bottle of strong claret, and this you mix with your drinking water, squeezing a lemon into it. Limes are better, but harder to get,--you can only buy them when schooners come in from the Gulf islands. But no one knows how delicious lemonade can be made until he has tasted lemonade made of limes.

I saw a really pleasing study for an artist this morning. A friend accompanied me to the French market, and we bought an enormous quant.i.ty of figs for about fifteen cents. We could not half finish them; and we sought rest under the cool, waving shadow of a eunuch banana-tree in the Square. As I munched and munched a half-naked boy ran by,--a fellow that would have charmed Murillo, with a skin like a new cent in colour, and heavy ma.s.ses of hair ma.s.sed as tastefully as if sculptured in ebony. I threw a fig at him and hit him in the back. He ate it, and coolly walked toward us with his little bronze hands turned upward and opened to their fullest capacity, and a pair of great black eyes flashed a request for more. You never saw such a pair of eyes,--deep and dark,--a night without a moon. Spoke to him in English,--no answer; in French,--no response. My friend bounced him with _Spak-ne Italiano_, or something of that kind, but it was no good. We asked him by signs where he came from, and he pointed to a rakish lugger rocking at the Picayune pier. I filled his little brown hands with figs, but he did not smile. He gravely thanked us with a flash of the eye like a gleam of a black opal, and murmured, "Ah, mille gratias, Senor." Why, that boy _was_ Murillo's boy after all, _propria persona_. He departed to the rakish lugger, and we dreamed of Moors and gipsies under the emasculated banana.

L. HEARN.

TO H. E. KREHBIEL

NEW ORLEANS, 1878.

MY DEAR KREHBIEL,--Your letter took a long week to reach me; perhaps by reason of the quarantine regulations which interpose some extraordinary barriers, little Chinese walls, across the country below Memphis. Thus am I somewhat tardy in responding.

The same sentiment which caused me so much pleasure on reading your ideas on the future of musical philosophy occasioned something of sincere regret on reading your words,--"I am not a thoroughly educated musician," etc. I had hoped (and still hope, and believe with all my heart, dear Krehbiel) that the Max Muller of Music would be none other than yourself. Perhaps you will therefore pardon some little observations from one who knows nothing about music.

I fancy that you have penetrated just so far into the Temple of your Art that, like one of the initiates of Eleusis, you commence to experience such awe and reverence for its solemn vastness and its whispers of mystery as tempt you to forego further research. You suddenly forget how much farther you have advanced into the holy precincts than most mortals, who seldom cross the vestibule;--the more you advance the more seemingly infinite becomes the vastness of the place, the more interminable its vistas of arches, and the more mysterious its endless successions of aisles. The Vatican with its sixty thousand rooms is but a child's toy house compared with but one of the countless wings of Art's infinite temples; and the outer world, viewing only the entrance, narrow and low as that of a pyramid, can no more comprehend the Illimitable that lies beyond it than they can measure the deeps of the Eternities beyond the fixed stars. I cannot help believing that the little shadow of despondency visible in your last letter is an evidence of how thoroughly you have devoted yourself to Music, and a partial contradiction of your own words. It would be irrational in you to expect that you could achieve your purposes in the very blush of manhood, as it were; but you ought not to forget altogether that you already stand in knowledge on a footing with many grey-haired disciples and apostles of the art, whose names are familiar in musical literature. I believe you can become anything musical you desire to become; but in art-study one must devote one's whole life to self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody else. You should feel the determination of those neophytes of Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly abandoned in darkness and rising water, whence there was no escape save by an iron ladder. As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the climber.

It seems to me that want of confidence in one's self is not less a curse than it appears to be a consequence of knowledge. You hesitate to accept a position on the ground of your own feeling of inadequacy; and the one who fills it is somebody who does not know the rudiments of his duty.

"Fools rush in," etc., and were you to decline the situation proffered by Mr. Thomas, merely because you don't think yourself qualified to fill it, I hope you do not imagine that any better scholar will fill the bill. On the contrary, I believe that some d--d quack would take the position, even at a starvation salary, and actually make himself a reputation on the mere strength of cheek and ignorance. However, you tell me of many other reasons. Of course, ---- is a vast and varied a.s.s,--a piebald quack of the sort who makes respectability an apology for lack of brains; but I fancy that you would be sure to find some a.s.ses at the head of any inst.i.tution of the sort in this country. The demand for art of any kind is new, and so long as people cannot tell the difference between a quack and a scholar, the former, having the cheek of a mule and a pompous deportment, is bound to get his work in. I don't think I should care much about the plans and actions of such people, but content myself, were I in your place, by showing myself superior to them. There is one thing in regard to a position like that you speak of,--it would afford you large opportunity for study, and in fact compel study upon you as a public instructor. At least it seems so to me. Then, again, remember that your connection with the _Gazette_ leaves you in the position of the Arabian prince who was marbleized from his loins down. As an artist you are but half alive there; one half of your existence is paralyzed; you waste your energies in the creation of works which are coffined within twelve hours after their birth; your power of usefulness is absorbed in a direction which can give you no adequate reward hereafter; and the little time you can devote to your studies and your really valuable work is too often borrowed from sleep. From the daily press I think you have obtained about all you will get from it in the regard of reputation, etc.; and there is no future really worth seeking in it. Even the most successful editors live a sort of existence which I certainly do not envy, and I am sure you would soon sicken of.

Do you not think, too, that any situation like that now offered you might lead to a far better one under far better conditions? It would certainly introduce you to many whose friendship and appreciation would be invaluable. I do not believe that Cincinnati is your true field for future work, and I cannot persuade myself that the city will ever become a _permanent_ artistic centre; but I am satisfied that you will drift out of the newspaper drudgery before long, and if you have an opportunity to obtain a good footing in the East, I would take it.

Thomas ought to be capable of making an Eastern pedestal for you to light on; for, judging by the admiration expressed for him by the _Times_, _Tribune_, _World_, _Herald_, _Sun_, etc., he must have some influence with musical centres. Then Europe would be open to you in a short time with its extraordinary opportunities of art-study, and its treasures of musical literature, to be devoured free of cost. Your researches into the archaeology of music, I need hardly say, must be made in Europe rather than here; and I hope you will before many twelvemonths be devouring the Musical Department of the British Museum, and the libraries of Paris and the Eternal City.

However, I do not pretend to be an adviser,--only a _suggester_. I think your good little wife would be a good adviser; for women seem blessed with a kind of divine intuition, and I sometimes believe they can see much farther into the future than men. You must not get disgusted with my long letter. I could not help telling you what interest your last excited in me regarding your own prospects.

Let me tell you something that I have been thinking about the bagpipe.

Somewhere or other I have read that the bagpipe was a Roman military instrument, and was introduced into Scotland by the Roman troops, together with the "kilt." It must have occurred to you that the Highland dress bears a ghostly resemblance to that of the Roman private as exhibited on the Column of Trajan. I cannot remember where I have read this, but you can doubtless inform me.

I am still well, although I have even had the experience of nursing a friend sick of yellow fever. The G.o.ds are sparing me for some fantastic reason. I enclose some specimens of the death notices which sprinkle our town, and send a copy of the last _Item_.

My eyes are eternally played out, and I shall have to abandon newspaper work altogether before long. Perhaps I shall do better in some little business. What is eternally rising up before me now like a spectre is the ?--"Where shall I go?--what shall I do?" Sometimes I think of Europe, sometimes of the West Indies,--of Florida, France, or the wilderness of London. The time is not far off when I must go somewhere,--if it is not to join the "Innumerable Caravan." Whenever I go down to the wharves, I look at the white-winged ships. O ye messengers, swift Hermae of Traffic, ghosts of the infinite ocean, whither will ye bear me?--what destiny will ye bring me,--what hopes, what despairs?

Your sincere friend and admirer, L. HEARN.

TO H. E. KREHBIEL

NEW ORLEANS, 1878.

MY DEAR KREHBIEL,--I received your admirable little sketch. It pleased me more than the others,--perhaps because, having to deal with a simpler subject, you were less hampered by mechanical details and could maintain your light, gossipy, fresh method of instruction in all its simple force.

I recognized several of the cuts. That of the uppermost figure at the right-hand corner was of the G.o.d Terminus, a most ancient deity, and his instrument is of corresponding antiquity perhaps, although in country districts the Termina were generally characterized by a certain sylvan rudeness. The earliest Termina were mere blocks of wood or stone. Among the ancients a circle of ground, or square border--it was set by law in Rome at two feet wide--surrounded every homestead. This was inviolate to the G.o.ds, and the Termina were placed at intervals along its borders, or at the corners. At certain days in the year the proprietor made the circuit, pushing victims before him, and chanting hymns to the G.o.d of boundaries. The same G.o.ds existed among the ancient Hindoos, with whom the Greeks and Romans must have had a close relationship in remote antiquity. The Greeks called these deities the ?e?? ?????. I do not know whence you got the figure; but I know it is a common one of Terminus; and such _eau-forte_ engravers as Gessner, who excelled in antique subjects, delighted to introduce it in sylvan scenes. I have an engraving by Leopold Flameng,--called _La Satyresse_,--a female satyr playing on the double flute (charming figure) and old Terminus with his single flute accompanies her in the background,--smiling from his pedestal of stone.

The first flute-player on the left-hand side, at the lower corner, is evidently from a vase, as the treatment of the hair denotes--I should say a Greek vase; and the second one, with the mouth-bandage, in spite of the half-Egyptian face, appears to be an Etruscan figure. The treatment of the eyes and profile looks Etruscan. Some of the flutes in the upper part of the drawing are much more complicated than I had supposed any of the antique flutes were.

You will find a charming version of the Medusa story in Kingsley's "Heroes"--for little ones. Of course he does not tell why Medusa's hair was turned into snakes. There are several other versions of the legend.

I prefer that in which the sword is subst.i.tuted for the sickle,--a most unwarlike weapon, and a utensil, moreover, sacred to the G.o.ddess of Harvests. The sword given by Hermes to Perseus is said to have been that wherewith he slew the monster Argus,--a diamond blade. Like the Runic swords forged by the gnomes under the roots of the hills of Scandinavia, this weapon slew whenever brandished.

Fever is bad still. I had another attack of dengue, but have got nearly over it. I find lemon-juice the best remedy. All over town there are little white notices pasted on the lamp-posts or the pillars of piazzas, bearing the dismal words:--

Decede Ce matin, a 3 heures Julien Natif de ----,

and so on. The death notices are usually surmounted by an atrocious cut of a weeping widow sitting beneath a weeping willow--with a huge mausoleum in the background. Yellow fever deaths occur every day close by. Somebody is advocating firing off cannon as a preventive. This plan of shooting Yellow Jack was tried in '53 without success. It brings on rain; but a rainy day always heralds an increase of the plague. You will see by the _Item's_ tabulated record that there is a curious periodicity in the increase. It might be described by a line like this--

[Ill.u.s.tration]

You have doubtless seen the records of pulsations made by a certain instrument, for detecting the rapidity of blood-circulation. The fever actually appears to have a pulsation of graduated increase like that of a feverish vein. I think this demonstrates a regularity in the periods of germ incubation,--affected, of course, more or less by atmospheric changes.

Hope you will have your musical talks republished in book form. Send us _Golden Hours_ once in a while. It will always have a warm notice in the _Item_. Yours in much hurry, with promise of another epistle soon.

L. HEARN.

Regards to all the boys.