The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 4

Oh!--the idea of telling _him_ what I should like to say to her!...

Yet it is not possible to see him smile, and to remain vexed with him.

Anyhow, I do not feel inclined to talk. For thirty-eight hours I have not eaten anything; and my romantic dreams, nourished with tobacco-smoke only, are frequently interrupted by a sudden inner aching that makes me wonder how long I shall be able to remain without food. Three more days of railroad travel--and no money!... My neighbour yesterday asked me why I did not eat;--how quickly he changed the subject when I told him! Certainly I have no right to complain: there is no reason why he should feed me. And I reflect upon the folly of improvidence.

Then my reflection is interrupted by the apparition of a white hand holding out to me a very, very large slice of brown bread, with an inch-thick cut of yellow cheese thereon; and I look up, hesitating, into the face of the Norwegian girl. Smiling, she says to me, in English, with a pretty childish accent:

"Take it, and eat it."

I take it, and devour it. Never before nor since did brown bread and cheese seem to me so good. Only after swallowing the very last crumb do I suddenly become aware that, in my surprise and hunger, I forgot to thank her. Impulsively, and at the wrong moment, I try to say some grateful words.

Instantly, and up to the roots of her hair, she flushes crimson: then, bending forward, she puts some question in a clear sharp tone that fills me with fear and shame. I do not understand the question: I understand only that she is angry; and for one cowering moment my instinct divines the power and the depth of Northern anger. My face burns; and her grey eyes, watching it burn, are grey steel; and her smile is the smile of a daughter of men who laugh when they are angry.

And I wish myself under the train,--under the earth,--utterly out of sight forever. But my dark neighbour makes some low-voiced protest,--a.s.sures her that I had only tried to thank her. Whereat the level brows relax, and she turns away, without a word, to watch the flying landscape; and the splendid flush fades from her cheek as swiftly as it came. But no one speaks: the train rushes into the dusk of five and thirty years ago ... and that is all!

... What _can_ she have imagined that I said?... My swarthy comrade would not tell me. Even now my face burns again at the thought of having caused a moment's anger to the kind heart that pitied me,--brought a blush to the cheek of the being for whose sake I would so gladly have given my life.... But the shadow, the golden shadow of her, is always with me; and, because of her, even the name of the land from which she came is very, very dear to me.

In Cincinnati Hearn eventually found work that enabled him to live, though this did not come immediately, as is proved by an anecdote, related by himself, of his early days there. A Syrian peddler employed him to help dispose of some acc.u.mulated wares, sending him out with a consignment of small mirrors. Certainly no human being was more unfitted by nature for successful peddling than Lafcadio Hearn, and at the end of the day he returned to the Syrian with the consignment intact. Setting down his burden to apologize for his failure he put his foot accidentally upon one of the mirrors, and thrown into a panic by the sound of the splintering gla.s.s, he fled incontinently, and never saw the merchant again, nor ever again attempted mercantile pursuits.

The first regular work he obtained was as a type-setter and proof-reader in the Robert Clarke Company, where--as he mentions in one of his letters--he endeavoured to introduce reforms in the American methods of punctuation, and a.s.similate it more closely to the English standards, but without, as he confesses, any success. It was from some of these struggles for typographical changes, undertaken with hot-headed enthusiasm for perfection, that he derived his nickname of "Old Semicolon," given him in amiable derision by his fellows. Mechanical work of this character could not satisfy him long, though the experience was useful to the young artist in words beginning his laborious self-training in the use of his tools. Punctuation and typographical form remained for him always a matter of profound importance, and in one of his letters he declared that he would rather abandon all the royalties to his publisher than be deprived of the privilege of correcting his own proofs; corrections which in their amplitude often devoured in printer's charges the bulk of his profits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAFCADIO HEARN _About 1873_]

Later he secured, for a brief period, a position as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, at that time librarian of the public library of Cincinnati, and here again he found food for his desires in a free access to the recondite matters to which already his genius was tending; but again he was driven by poverty and circ.u.mstance into broader fields, and early in 1874 he was working as a general reporter on the Cincinnati _Enquirer_. His work was of a kind that gave him at first no scope for his talents and must have been peculiarly unsympathetic, consisting of daily market reports, until chance opened the eyes of his employers to his capacity for better things. A peculiarly atrocious crime, still known in Cincinnati annals as the "Tan-yard Murder," had been communicated to the office of the _Enquirer_ at a moment when all the members of the staff, usually detailed to cover such a.s.signments, were absent. The editor calling upon the indifferent G.o.ds for some one instantly to take up the matter, was surprised by a timid request from the shy cub-reporter who turned in daily market "stuff," to be allowed to deal with this tragedy, and after some demur, he consented to accept what appeared an inadequate answer from the adjured deities. The "copy"

submitted some hours later caused astonished eyebrows, was considered worthy of "scare-heads," and for the nine succeeding days of the life of the wonder, Cincinnati sought ardently the Hoffmannesque story whose poignantly chosen phrases set before them a grim picture that caused the flesh to crawl upon their bones. It was realized at once that the cub-reporter had unsuspected capacities and his talents were allowed expansion in the direction of descriptive stories. One of the most admired of these was a record of a visit to the top of the spire of St.

Peter's Cathedral, where hauled in ropes by a steeple-jack to the arms of the cross which crowned it, he obtained a lofty view of the city and returned to write an article that enabled all the town to see the great panorama through his myopic eyes, which yet could bear testimony to colour and detail not obvious to clearer vision.

It was in this year that some trusting person was found willing to advance a small sum of money for the publication of an amorphous little Sunday sheet, professedly comic and satiric, ent.i.tled _Ye Giglampz_. H.

F. Farny contributed the cartoons, and Lafcadio Hearn the bulk of the text. On June 21st of that year the first number appeared, with the announcement that it was to be "published daily, except week days," and was to be "devoted to art, literature, and satire." The first page was adorned with a d.i.c.ky Doylish picture of Herr Kladderadatsch presenting Mr. Giglampz to an enthusiastic public, which showed decided talent, but the full page cartoon, though it may have been amusing when published, is satire turned dry and dusty after the lapse of thirty-two years, and it may be only vaguely discerned now to refer in some way to the question of a third term for President Grant.

The pictures are easily preferable to the text, though no doubt it too has suffered from the desiccation of time, but Lafcadio Hearn was at no time, one might infer, better fitted for satire than for peddling; _Ye Giglampz_ plainly "jooks wi' deefeculty," and the young journalist's views upon art and politics are such as might be expected from a boy of twenty-four.

The prohibition question, the Chicago fire, a local river disaster, and the Beecher scandal are all dealt with by pen and pencil, much clipping from _Punch_ and some translations from the comic journals of Paris fill the columns, and after nine weeks _Ye Giglampz_ met an early and well-deserved death. The only copies of the paper now known to be in existence are contained in a bound volume belonging to Mr. Farny, discovered by him in a second-hand bookshop, with some pencil notes in the margin in Hearn's handwriting. One of these notes records that an advertis.e.m.e.nt--there were but three in the first number--was never paid for, so presumably this volume, monument of an unfortunate juvenile exploit, was once in Hearn's meagre library, but was discarded when he left Cincinnati.

In the following year Hearn had left the _Enquirer_ and was recording the Exposition of 1876 for the _Gazette_, and in the latter part of that year he was a regular reporter for the _Commercial_.

In 1895--writing to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain--Hearn speaks of John c.o.c.kerill, then visiting j.a.pan, and draws an astonishingly vivid picture of the editor who was in command of the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ in the '70's. These occasional trenchant, accurate sketches from life, to be found here and there in his correspondence, show a shrewdness of judgement and coolness of observation which his companions never suspected. He says:--

"I began daily newspaper work in 1874, in the city of Cincinnati, on a paper called the _Enquirer_ edited by a sort of furious young man named c.o.c.kerill. He was a hard master, a tremendous worker, and a born journalist. I think none of us liked him, but we all admired his ability to run things. He used to swear at us, work us half to death (never sparing himself), and he had a rough skill in sarcasm that we were all afraid of. He was fresh from the army, and full of army talk. In a few years he had forced up the circulation of the paper to a very large figure and made a fortune for the proprietor, who got jealous of him and got rid of him.... He afterwards took hold of a St. Louis paper,--then of a New York daily, the _World_.... He ran the circulation up to nearly a quarter of a million, and again had the proprietor's jealousy to settle with.... He also built up the _Advertiser_, but getting tired, sold out, and went travelling. Finally, Bennett of the _Herald_ sends him to j.a.pan at, I believe, $10,000 a year.

"I met him here to-day and talked over old times. He has become much gentler and more pleasant, and seems to be very kindly. He is also a little grey. What I have said about him shows that he is no very common person. The man who can make three or four fortunes for other men, without doing the same thing for himself, seldom is. He is not a literary man, nor a well-read man, nor a scholar,--but has immense common sense, and a large experience of life,--besides being, in a Mark-Twainish way, much of a humourist."

Those who knew John c.o.c.kerill will find in this portrait not one line omitted which would make for truth and sympathy. One of Hearn's a.s.sociates of this period, Joseph Tunison, says of his work:--

"In Cincinnati such work was much harder than now, because more and better work was demanded of a man for his weekly stipend than at present.... Had he been then on a New York daily his articles would have attracted bidding from rival managements, but in Cincinnati there was little, if any, encouragement for such brilliant powers as his. The _Commercial_ took him on at twenty dollars a week.... Though he worked hard for a pittance he never slighted anything he had to do.... He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an a.s.signment.... His employers kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper--the night stations--for in that field developed the most sensational events, and he was strongest in the unusual and the startling."

For two years more this was the routine of his daily life. He formed, in spite of his shyness, some ties of intimacy; especially with Joseph Tunison, a man of unusual cla.s.sical learning, with H. F. Farny, the artist, and with the now well-known musical critic and lecturer, H. E.

Krehbiel. Into these companionships he threw all the ardour of a very young man; an ardour increased beyond even the usual intensity of young friendships, by the natural warmth of his feelings and the loneliness of his life, bereft of all those ties of family common to happier fates. In their company he developed a quality of bonhomie that underlay the natural seriousness of his temperament, and is frequently visible in his letters, breaking through the gravity of his usual trend of thought.

Absence and time diminished but little his original enthusiasm, as the letters included in this volume will bear testimony, though in later years one by one his early friendships were chilled and abandoned. One of the charges frequently brought against Lafcadio Hearn by his critics in after years was that he was inconstant in his relations with his friends. Mr. Tunison says of him:--

"He had a fashion of dropping his friends one by one, or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing. Whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit would be hard to say, but he never spoke ill of them afterwards. He seemed to forget all about them, though two or three acquaintances of his early years of struggle and privation were always after spoken of with the tenderest regard, and their companionship was eagerly sought whenever this was possible."

The charge of inconstancy is, to those who knew Lafcadio Hearn well, of a sufficiently serious nature to warrant some a.n.a.lysis at this point, while dealing with the subject of his first intimacies, for up to this period he appears to have had no ties other than those, so bitterly ruptured, with the people of his own blood, or the mere pa.s.sing amities of school-boy life. That many of his closest friendships were either broken abruptly or sank into abeyance is quite true, but the reason for this was explicable in several ways. The first and most comprehensible cause was his inherent shyness of nature and an abnormal sensitiveness, which his early experiences intensified to a point not easily understood by those of a naturally self-confident temperament unqualified by blighting childish impressions. A look, a word, which to the ordinary robust nature would have had no meaning of importance, touched the quivering sensibilities of the man like a searing acid, and stung him to an anguish of resentment and bitterness which nearly always seemed fantastically out of proportion to the offender, and this bitterness was usually misjudged and resented. Only those cursed with similar sensibilities--"as tender as the horns of c.o.c.kled snails"--could understand and forgive such an idiosyncrasy. It must be remembered that all qualities have their synchronous defects. The nature which is as reflective as water to the subtlest shades of the colour and form of life must of its essential character be subject to rufflement by the lightest breath of harshness or misconception.

Professor Chamberlain, who himself suffered from this tendency to unwarranted estrangement, has dealt with another phase of the matter with a n.o.ble sympathy too rare among Hearn's friends. He says, in a letter to the biographer:--

"The second point was his att.i.tude toward his friends,--his quondam friends,--all of whom he gradually dropped, with but very few exceptions. Some I know who were deeply and permanently irritated by this neglect, or ingrat.i.tude, as they termed it. I never could share such a feeling, though of course I lamented the severance of connection with one so gifted, and made two or three attempts at a renewal of intercourse, which were met at first by cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing me to desist from further endeavours. The reason I could not resent this was because Lafcadio's dropping of his friends seemed to me to have its roots in that very quality which made the chief charm of his works. I mean his idealism. Friends, when he first made them, were for him more than mere mortal men, they stood endowed with every perfection. He painted them in the beautiful colours of his own fancy, and worshipped them, pouring out at their feet all the pa.s.sionate emotionalism of his Greek nature. But Lafcadio was not emotional merely; another side of his mind had the keen insight of a man of science. Thus he soon came to see that his idols had feet of clay, and--being so purely subjective in his judgements--he was indignant with them for having, as he thought, deceived him. Add to this that the rigid character of his philosophical opinions made him perforce despise, as intellectual weaklings, all those who did not share them, or shared them only in a lukewarm manner,--and his disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable. For no man living, except himself, idolized Herbert Spencer in his peculiar way; turning Spencer's scientific speculations into a kind of mysticism. This mysticism became a religion to him. The slightest cavil raised against it was resented by him as a sacrilege. Thus it was hardly possible for him to retain old ties of friendship except with a few men whom he met on the plane of every-day life apart from the higher intellectual interests. Lafcadio himself was a greater sufferer from all this than any one else; for he possessed the affectionate disposition of a child, and suffered poignantly when sympathy was withdrawn, or--what amounted to the same--when he himself withdrew it. He was much to be pitied,--always wishing to love, and discovering each time that his love had been misplaced."

To put the matter in its simplest form, he loved with a completeness and tenderness extremely rare among human beings. When he discovered--as all who love in this fashion eventually do--that the objects of his affection had no such tenderness to give in return, he felt himself both deceived and betrayed and allowed the relation to pa.s.s into the silence of oblivion.

There is still another facet of this subject which is made clear by some of the letters written in the last years of his life, when he had withdrawn himself almost wholly from intercourse with all save his immediate family. Failing strength warned him that not many more years remained in which to complete his self-imposed task, and like a man who nears his goal with shortening breath and labouring pulse, he let slip one by one every burden, and cast from him his dearest possessions, lest even the weight of one love should hold him back from the final grasp upon the ideal he had so long pursued with avid heart. This matter has been dwelt upon at some length, and somewhat out of due place, but the charge of disloyalty to friendship is a serious one, and a full understanding of the facts upon which it rested is important to a comprehension of the man.

In these early days in Cincinnati, however, no blight had yet come upon his young friendships, and they proved a source of great delight.

Krehbiel was already deeply immersed in studies of folk-songs and folk-music,--his collection of which has since become famous,--and Lafcadio threw himself with enthusiasm into similar studies, his natural love for exotic lore rendering them peculiarly sympathetic to his genius. Together they ransacked the libraries for discoveries, and sought knowledge at first hand from wandering minstrels in Chinese laundries, or from the exiles of many lands who gathered in the polyglot slums along the river-banks. In the dedication of "Some Chinese Ghosts"

is recorded an echo of one of these experiences, when Krehbiel opened the heart of a reserved Oriental to give up to them all his knowledge, by proving that he himself could play their strange instruments and sing their century-old songs. The dedication runs thus:--

TO MY FRIEND, HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL, THE MUSICIAN, WHO, SPEAKING THE SPEECH OF MELODY UNTO THE CHILDREN OF TEN-HIA,-- UNTO THE WANDERING TSING-JIN, WHOSE SKINS HAVE THE COLOUR OF GOLD,-- MOVED THEM TO MAKE STRANGE SOUNDS UPON THE SERPENT-BELLIED SAN-HIEN; PERSUADED THEM TO PLAY FOR ME UPON THE SHRIEKING YA-HIEN; PREVAILED ON THEM TO SING ME A SONG OF THEIR NATIVE LAND,-- THE SONG OF MOHLI-WA.

THE SONG OF THE JASMINE-FLOWER.

This dedication is of peculiar interest; "Chinese Ghosts" has been long out of print, and of the few copies issued--nearly the whole edition was destroyed--but a handful still exist. It gives a typical example of the musical, rhythmic prose which the young reporter was endeavouring to master. He had fallen under the spell of the French Romantic school and of their pa.s.sion for _le mot juste_, of their love for exotic words, of their research for the grotesque, the fantastic, the bizarre. Already out of his tiny income he was extracting what others in like case spent upon comforts or pleasures, to buy dictionaries and thesauri, and was denying himself food and clothes to purchase rare books. The works of Theophile Gautier were his daily companions, in which he saturated his mind with fantasies of the Orient, Spain, and Egypt, refreshing himself after the dull routine of the day's work with endeavours to transliterate into English the strange and monstrous tales of his model, those abnormal imaginations whose alien aroma almost defied transference into a less supple tongue.

His friend Tunison, writing of Hearn at this period, says:--

"But it was impossible for even this slavery of journalism to crush out of him his determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of the morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of columns in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and ma.n.u.script, translating from Gautier."

These translations--including "Clarimonde," "Arria Marcella," and "King Candaule"--with three others were published in 1882 under the t.i.tle of the initial tale, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," having been gathered from the "Nouvelles," and the "Romans et Contes." The preface concludes thus:

"It is the artist who must judge of Gautier's creations. To the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, to the lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth,--of the charm of youthful dreams and young pa.s.sion in its blossoming,--of poetic ambitions and the sweet pantheism that finds all Nature vitalized by the Spirit of the Beautiful,--to such the first English version of these graceful phantasies is offered in the hope that it may not be found wholly unworthy of the original."

Up to this time no translation into English of Gautier's "Contes" had been attempted, and the ma.n.u.script sought a publisher in vain for half a dozen years. Later, when the little volume had reached a small but appreciative audience, another English version was attempted by Andrew Lang, but proved an unsuccessful rival, lacking the warmth and fidelity of its predecessor.

Other attempts in the same direction met with no better success, partly, in some cases, because of the reluctance any Anglo-Saxon publisher inevitably feels in issuing works which would encounter no barriers of rigid decorum between themselves and the world of French readers. The youthful artist working in any medium is p.r.o.ne to be impatient of the prejudices of Anglo-Saxon pudency. The beautiful is to him always its own justification for being, and his inexperience makes him unafraid of the nudities of art. The refusal to deal freely with any form of beauty seems to him as bloodlessly pietistic as the priest's excision of "the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the nymphs in the brake." Yet many years after, when the boy had himself become the father of a boy and began to think of his son's future, he said: "What shall I do with him? ... send him to grim Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord?--I am beginning to think that really much of the ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded on the best experience of man under civilization; and I understand lots of things I used to think superst.i.tious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."

This unavailing struggle to find an outlet for the expression of something more worthy of his abilities than the sensational side of journalism caused him the deepest discouragement and depression; and his youthful ardour, denied a safe channel for its forces, turned to less healthful instincts. The years in Cincinnati were at times marred by experiments and outbursts, undertaken with bitter enthusiasm for fantastic ethical codes, and finally caused severance of his ties with his employers and the town itself. The tendency of his tastes toward the study of strange peoples and civilizations made him find much that was attractive in "the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, and led him to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study,"--says Joseph Tunison,--"things that were common to these people in their every-day life his vivid imagination transformed into romance."

This led him eventually into impossible experiments, and brought upon him the resentment of his friends. Many years after, in j.a.pan, he referred to this matter in a letter to one of his pupils, and the letter is so illuminative of this matter as to make it desirable to insert it here, though rightly it should be included in the volume dealing with his life in j.a.pan.

DEAR OCHIAI,--I was very happy to get your kind letter, and the pleasant news it conveyed....

And now that all your trouble is over, perhaps you will sometimes find it hard not to feel angry with those who ostracized you for so long.

It would at least be natural that you should feel angry with them, or with some at least. But I hope you will not allow yourself to feel anger towards them, even in your heart. Because the real truth is that it was not really your schoolmates who were offended: it only appeared so. The real feeling against you was what is called a _national_ sentiment,--that jealous love of country with which every man is born, and which you, quite unknowingly, turned against you for a little while. So I hope you will love all your schoolmates none the less,--even though they treated you distantly for so long.

When I was a young man in my twenties, I had an experience very like yours. I resolved to take the part of some people who were much disliked in the place where I lived. I thought that those who disliked them were morally wrong,--so I argued boldly for them and went over to their side. Then all the rest of the people stopped speaking to me, and I hated them for it. But I was too young then to understand. There were other moral questions, much larger than those I had been arguing about, which really caused the whole trouble. The people did not know how to express them very well; they only _felt_ them. After some years I discovered that I was quite mistaken--that I was under a delusion. I had been opposing a great national and social principle without knowing it. And if my best friends had not got angry with me, I could not have learned the truth so well,--because there are many things that are hard to explain and can only be taught by experience....

Ever very affectionately, Your old teacher, LAFCADIO HEARN.

k.u.mAMOTO, March 27, 1894.