The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 36

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 very 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; for I will certainly call on you in Philadelphia some day.

I would not hesitate, if I were you, to begin the _magnum opus_;--the only time to hesitate would be when it is all complete, before giving to the printer. Then one may perhaps commune with one's self to advantage upon the question of what might be gained or lost by waiting for more knowledge through fresh expansions of science. But the true way to attempt an enduring work is to begin it as a duty, without considering one's self in the matter at all, but the subject only,--which you love more and more the longer you caress it, and find it taking form and colour and beauty with the patient years.

I am horribly ignorant about scientific matters; but sometimes the encouragement of a layman makes the success of the prelate.

Now, replying to your question about "Chita." "Chita" was founded on the fact of a child saved from the Lost Island disaster by some Louisiana fisher-folk, and brought up by them. Years after a Creole hunter recognized her, and reported her whereabouts to relatives. These, who were rich, determined to bring her up as young ladies are brought up in the South, and had her sent to a convent. But she had lived the free healthy life of the coast, and could not bear the convent;--she ran away from it, married a fisherman, and lives somewhere down there now,--the mother of mult.i.tudinous children.

And about my work, I can only tell you this:--I will have two ill.u.s.trated articles on a West Indian trip in the _Harper's Monthly_ soon,--within four or five months. These will be followed by brief West Indian sketches. Other sketches, not suited for the magazine, will go to form a volume to be published later on. I do not correspond or write for any newspaper, and I would always let you know in advance where anything would be published written by me.

You know what the nervous cost of certain imaginative work means; and this sort of work I do not think I shall be able to do here. One has no vital energy to spare in such a climate. I cannot read Spencer here,--gave up the "Biology" (vol. II) in despair. But I did not miss the wonderful page about the evolution of the eye--hair--snail-horn--etc., etc.... I want to see anything you write that I can understand, with my limited knowledge of scientific terms and facts. And when you write again, tell me what you said of Loti in the letter I never received. Did you read his "Roman d'un Spahi"? I thought you would like it. If you do not, let me know why,--because Loti has had much literary influence upon me, and I want to know his faults as well as his merits. With love to you,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO GEORGE M. GOULD

SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, August, 1888.

DEAR GOULD,--Many thanks for the _quid_!--the surprising _quid_. I have been waiting to send you the _quo_, which I do not like so well as one taken in New Orleans, of which I have no copy within reach. But before I tell you anything about the _quo_, I ought to scold you for your startling deception. I pictured you as a much younger man than myself--although quite conscious of meeting an intelligence much more virile and penetrating than my own, and with an experience of life larger: this did not, however, astonish me; for whatever qualities I have lie only in that one direction which pleased you and won your friendship,--moreover, I had met several _much_ younger men than myself, my mental superiors in every respect. But, all of a sudden you come upon me with such a revelation of your personality as makes me half afraid of you. I perceive that your _envergure_ is much larger than I imagined:--I mean, of course, the mental spread-of-wing; and then your advice and suggestions, while manifesting your ability to teach me much in my own line, resemble only those proffered by old experienced masters in literary guidance. It is exactly the advice of Alden, among one or two others.

Now about the _quo_. I am about five feet three inches high, and weigh about 137 pounds in good health;--fever has had me down to 126. Nothing phthisical,--36 inches round the chest, stripped. Was born in June (27th), 1850, in Santa Maura (the antique Leucadia), of a Greek mother.

My father, Dr. Charles Bush Hearn, who spent most of his life in India, was surgeon-major of the 76th British regiment (now merged in West Riding Battalion). Do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead;--was last heard of (remarried) in Smyrna, about 1858-9. My father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history of my father's marriage. It is not, however, of the sort to interest you in a letter. I am very near-sighted, have lost one eye, which disfigures me considerably; and my near-sightedness always prevented the gratification of a natural _penchant_ for physical exercise. I am a good swimmer; that is all.

Your advice about story-writing is capital; I am not so sure about your suggestion of plot. I cannot believe--in view of the extraordinary changes (changes involving even the whole osseous structure) wrought in the offspring of Europeans or foreigners within a single generation by the tropical climate--that anything of the parental moral character on the _father's_ side would survive with force sufficient to produce the psychical phenomena you speak of. In temperate climates these do survive astonishingly, even through generations; in the tropics, Nature moulds every new being _at once_ into perfect accord with environment, or else destroys it. The idea you speak of occurred to me also; it was abandoned after a careful study of tropical conditions. It could only be used on an _inverse_ plot,--transporting the tropical child to the North. At least, I think so, with my present knowledge on the subject,--which might be vastly improved, no doubt....

About story-writing, dear friend, you ought to know I would like to be able to do nothing else. But even in these countries, where life is so cheap, I could not make the pot--or as they call it here, the _canari_--boil by story-writing until I gain more literary success, and can obtain high prices. A story takes at least ten or twelve months to write, that is, a story of the length of "Chita." Suppose it brings only $500,--half as much as you will soon be able to obtain for a single operation! It is pretty hard to live even in the tropics on that sum. I must write sketches too. They do me other good also, involve research I might otherwise neglect. I have prepared some twelve sketches in all, which obligated investigation that will prove invaluable for a forthcoming novelette.

I like your firm, strong, sonorous letter, better than anything of the sort I ever received. The only thing I did not relish in it was the suggestion that I should prepare a lecture, or make an appearance before a private club. I would not do it for anything! I shrink from real life, however, not at all because I am pessimistic. It is a very beautiful world:--the ugliness of some humanity only exists as the shadowing that outlines the view; the n.o.bility of man and the goodness of woman can only be felt by those who know the possibilities of degradation and corruption. Philosophically I am simply a follower of Spencer, whose mind gives me the greatest conception of Divinity I can yet expand to receive. The faultiness is not with the world, but with myself. I inherit certain susceptibilities, weaknesses, sensitivenesses, which render it impossible to adapt myself to the ordinary _milieu_; I have to make one of my own, wherever I go, and never mingle with that already made. True, I lose much knowledge, but I escape pains which, in spite of all your own knowledge, you could not wholly comprehend, for the simple reason that you _can_ mingle with men. By the way, it is no small disadvantage in life to be 5 ft. 3 in. high. I remember observing, at a great gathering of American merchant princes, that the small or insignificant looking men present might have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Success in life still largely depends upon the power to impose respect, the reserve of mere physical force; since the expansion of everybody's individuality--at the expense of everybody else's individuality--is still the law of existence.

I am not yet sure what I am going to do. One thing certain is that I am to go to South or to Central America--for monetary reasons. I may linger here long enough to finish a novelette. If not able to do so, I will perhaps be in New York before December. I left it October 2, 1887, after a stay of only three weeks, to return to the tropics. It was then impossible to visit Philadelphia. Should I go to the Continent from here, you will know at least six weeks in advance.

Thanks for the superb paper on Loti. I cannot imagine anything much finer in the way of literary a.n.a.lysis. But what does James want?--evolution to leap a thousand years? What he cla.s.ses as sensual perceptions must be sensitized and refined supernally,--fully evolved and built up _before_ the moral ones, of which they are the physiological foundations, pedestals. Granting the doubt as to the ultimate nature of Mind, it is still tolerably positive that its development--so far as man is concerned--follows the development of the nervous system; and that very sensuousness which at once delights and scandalizes James, rather seems to me a splendid augury of the higher sensitiveness to come, in some future age of writers and poets,--the finer "_sensibility of soul_," whose creative work will caress the n.o.bler emotions more delicately than Loti's genius ever caressed the senses of colour and form and odour.

You ask about my idea of Whitman? I have not patience for him,--not as for Emerson. Enormous _suggestiveness_ in both, rather than clear utterance. I used to like John Weiss better than Emerson. Then there is a s.h.a.gginess, an uncouthness, a Calibanishness about Whitman that repels. He makes me think of some gigantic dumb being that sees things, and wants to make others see them, and cannot for want of a finer means of expression than Nature gives him. But there is manifest the rude n.o.bility of the man,--the primitive and patriarchal soul-feeling to men and the world. Whitman lays a Cyclopean foundation on which, I fancy, some wonderful architect will yet build up some marvellous thing....

Yes, there is nonsense in Swinburne, but he is merely a melodist and colourist. He enlarges the English tongue,--shows its richness, unsuspected flexibility, admirable sponge-power of beauty-absorption. He is not to be despised by the student.

Let me pray you not to make mention of anything written to you thus, even incidentally, to newspaper folk--or to any literary folk who would not be _intimate_ friends. There are reasons, more than personal, for this suggestion, acceptance of which would remove any check on frankness.

Best love to you, from LAFCADIO HEARN.

Speaking of Whitman, I must add that my idea of him is not consciously stable. It has changed within some years. What I like, however, was not Whitman exactly,--rather the perception of something Whitman feels, and disappoints by his attempted expression of.

After closing letter I remember you wanted to know about ill.u.s.trations in magazine. They are after photos. I am sorry to say incorrect use has been made of several: the types published as _Sacratra_ were not _Sacratra_, but in two cases half-breed Coolie,--one seemingly of Southern India, showing a touch of Malay. There were other errors. It is horrible not to be able to correct one's _own_ work,--on account of irregularities in mail involved by quarantine. In the December number you will see a study of a peculiar cla.s.s of young girls here. If you want, yourself, to have some particular photo of some particular thing, send word, and I will try to get it for you.

I can only work here of mornings. n.o.body dreams of eating before noon: all rise with the sun. After 2 P.M., the heat and weight of the air make thinking impossible. Your head gets heavy, as if there was lead in it, and you sleep.

TO GEORGE M. GOULD

SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, October, 1888.

DEAR FRIEND GOULD,--I have read your delightful letter,--also, the delightful essays of James you so kindly sent me. I suspect James has not his equal as a literary chemist: the a.n.a.lyses of his French contemporary, Lemaitre, are far less qualitative. You have made me know him as a critic;--I had only known him as a novelist. My work has been poor; it has been condensed and recondensed for the magazine till all originality has been taken out of it; finally I never had a chance to revise it in proof. I believe I have temporarily lost all creative power: it will come back to me, perhaps, when I inhale some Northern ozone.

I would like to call your attention to the article by Loti in _Fortnightly Review_--"Un Reve," a delicious little psychological phenomenon. Have you seen "Madame Chrysanthemum"--wonderfully ill.u.s.trated!

Are you perfectly, positively sure there is really a sharp distinction between moral and physical sensibilities? I doubt it. I suspect what we term the finer moral susceptibilities signify merely a more complex and perfect evolution of purely physical sensitiveness. The established distinction simply seems to me that "moral" feelings are those into which the s.e.xual instinct does not visibly enter, or those in which some form of desire, some form of egotism, does not predominate at the cost of justice to others. There is a queer vagueness about all definitions of the moral sense. When one's physical sensibilities are fully developed and properly balanced, I do not think wickedness to others possible. The cruel and the selfish are capable of doing what is called wrong, because they are ignorant of the suffering inflicted. Thorough consciousness of the result of acting forms morality, if morality is self-restraint, self-sacrifice, incapacity to injure unnecessarily;--one who understands pain does not give it. Of course, I am not a believer in free will. I do not believe in the individual soul,--though in the manifestations of a universal human, or divine, soul, I am inclined to believe, or to have that doubt which almost admits of belief. What offends in certain writings, I suppose, is the feeling that the writer's faculties are not perfectly balanced,--that certain senses are so much more developed than others that one can suspect him of yielding to cruelties of egotism. Perhaps I may say that I would call moral feelings, as distinguished from those termed physical, the sensitiveness of perception of suffering in others,--of the consequences of acts. But can those be thoroughly developed before those which conduce to self-preservation? I imagine the reverse to be the case. By the super-refinement of the earlier sensations comes the capacity for the "higher sentiments." It is true that moral standards are very old, but those existing are also very defective. Evolutionally, egotism must precede altruism;--altruism itself being only a sort of double reflex action of egotism.--All this is very badly written; but you can catch the idea I am trying to express.

When you think of tropical Nature as cruel and splendid, like a leopard, I fancy the Orient, which is tropical largely, dominates the idea.

Humanity has a great beauty in these tropics, a great charm,--that of childishness, and the goodness of childishness. As for the mysterious Nature, which is the soul of the land, it was understood by the ancient Mexicans, whose G.o.ddess of flowers, Coatlicue, was robed in a robe of serpents interwoven. She is rich in death as in life, this Nature, and lavish of both. I would love her; but I fear she is an enemy of the mind,--a hater of mental effort.

No, indeed, I did not laugh at your experiences. I have had nearly as multiform; but mine were less successful,--I was less fitted for them. I have not your advantages, nor capacities. I never learned German. It is only in America such careers are possible. I wish I could have finished like you, as a physician; for I hold, that with the modern development of medicine as an enormous interbranching system of science and philosophy, the physician is the only perfect man, mentally. Like those old Arabian physicians who affected to treat the soul, the modern knows the mind, the reason of actions, the source of impulses,--which must make him the most generous of men to the faults of others.

I don't like your plot for a medical novel at all. It involves ugliness.

I believe in Theophile Gautier's idea of art, study only the beautiful;--create only ideals, therefore. You are not a realist, I am sure. Then your plot is too thin. It has not the beauty nor depth of that simple narrative about a famous painter, or writer,--I forget which,--whose imagination rendered it impossible for him to complete his medical studies. Shapes impressed themselves upon his brain as on the brain of an artist: vividly to painfulness. He was in love, engaged to be married; under the peach flesh and behind the velvet gaze, he always saw the outlined skull, the empty darkness of void orbits. He had to abandon medicine for art. A very powerful short sketch might be made of this _fact_.

I believe in a medical novel,--a wonderful medical novel. We must chat about it. Why not use a fantastic element,--antic.i.p.ate discoveries hoped for,--antic.i.p.ate them so powerfully as to make the reader believe you are enunciating realities?

Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it.

It would have to be s.e.xual. Never could you 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 the 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 a compa.s.sion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive--pregnant with future pains innumerable.

I don't know why you hold the work of Spencer, etc., more colourless than those of the other philosophers and scientists whom you have studied--all except beastly Hegel: there is an awful poetry to me in the revelation of which these men are the mouthpieces, as much vaster than the old thoughts as the foam of suns in the _via lactea_ is vaster than the spume of a wave on the sea-beach. Wallace I know only as a traveller and naturalist; is it the same Wallace? I am very fond of him too: he is very human, fraternal: he is not like G.o.d the Father as Spencer is. I suppose what we need is G.o.d the Holy Ghost. He is not yet come.

Flower, who wrote that interesting little book "Fashion in Deformity"

and many other excellent things, could find some good texts here. I am convinced now that most of our fashions are deformities; that grace is savage, or must be savage in order to be perfect; that man was never made to wear shoes; that in order to comprehend antiquity, the secret of Greek art, one must know the tropics a little (so much has fashion invaded the rest of the world), and that the question of more or less liberty in the s.e.x relation is like the tariff question--one of localities and conditions, scarcely to be brought under a general rule.

TO GEORGE M. GOULD

SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, February, 1889.

DEAR GOULD,--A letter to you has been lying on my desk for months unfinished,--I can only just gum the envelope and let it go as it is. I am obliged at intervals--thank Goodness, only at very long ones--to let all correspondence, even the most important, wait a little or risk the results of interrupting a work which exacts all one's thinking time during waking hours. This has been partly my case,--having just completed a novelette; but I have also had a good deal of trouble about other matters that left me no chance to do anything until now. I am free again,--I hope for a good long time.

Meanwhile I received your pamphlets, and read every one with more pleasure than you could readily believe a non-scientific man could feel in them. Of course, those which interested me most were:

1. That on the Homing Instinct (a much better word than the French _orientation_). 2. That on the electric light. My first experience with the light was painful; then I learned to like it (the white, not the yellow) very much and found gaslight intensely disagreeable afterward.

By the way, do you correspond with Romanes, who solicits correspondence on the subject of animals? You know him, of course, the author of "Animal Intelligence" and "Mental Evolution in Animals." A man like that ought to be delighted with such a splendid and powerful suggestion as that of your pamphlet. I hope you are not too patriotic to think you cannot do better with a scientific suggestion abroad than at home. There are certain things that seem to me too worthy to remain buried in the archives of a medical society,--which ought to reach a larger scientific circle through a more eclectic medium, such as that of the superb foreign reviews, devoted to what used to be called natural history, but for which the term has long ago become too small. Still I am sure you must have heard from your paper on the homing instinct if the publication in which it appeared reached the quarters it ought to have reached.

I don't know what to tell you about myself. Since October last I have been buried in my room--facing, happily, a semi-circle of Mornes curving away into a sea like lapis lazuli--and have neither heard nor seen anything else. We had an epidemic of yellow fever which carried away many Europeans and strangers; but it is over, and the weather is delightful, if you can call weather delightful which keeps you drenched in perspiration from morning to night, and forces you to lie down and sleep in the afternoon if you dare attempt to write or read. The difficulty of work in such a climate only those who have had the experience can understand. I think my case is an experiment; almost a phenomenon,--and I am very curious to know the result by the verdict upon my work. I cannot judge it myself here. What at sundown seems good in the morning appears d.a.m.nably bad; and I was obliged to give every page a test of three or four days' waiting. My novelette made itself out of an incident related to me about a case of heroism during a great negro revolt.

There is no question but that I shall be in New York this summer, for a while. It is imperative. I have to oversee work before it can be published;--that which already appeared was in terribly bad shape on account of my not having seen the proofs. Then I may be getting out a little book.

Did you see the incident in regard to the admission of a remarkable young lady doctor into the profession by the faculty of Paris,--the remarks of Charcot and others? I thought of your medical novel. There were some remarks very suggestive made. The thesis of the candidate was the position and duty of woman as a physician. You know what those French are, and what peculiar ways they have of looking at the question of women as physicians;--the Paris papers made all kinds of _observations scabreuses_; but the dignity of the girl carried her splendidly through the ordeal--an ordeal to which Americans would never put a female student.

I have a curious compilation,--"Etudes pathologiques et historiques sur l'origine et la propagation de la Fievre Jaune" (1886),--perhaps you know it already,--by Dr. Cornilliac of Martinique. If you do not know it I will send it you from New York. It contains a great deal of valuable matter regarding the climate of the West Indies, and formative influences of that climate on races and temperament. Martinique has had several physicians of colonial celebrity,--how great I cannot estimate, being ignorant of their comparative value; but some of them have a decided charm as writers and historians. Such was Rufz de Lavison, author of a delightful history of the colony, and a work upon the _trigonocephalus_, which would not bear equal praise, I fancy. If you want any information about medical matters in Martinique, I will hunt it up for you.

I hope to see you and have a great chat with you. But the heat is great, and there is an acc.u.mulation of letters to answer, and you will forgive me for saying for the moment good-bye.

Your sincere friend, LAFCADIO HEARN.