Lafcadio Hearn

The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular literary work.

Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection, and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him the book was dedicated.

After the yellow fever had passed away "there were plenty of vacancies waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his sister....

A daily newspaper called the Item was at that time issued in New Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its production, "items" taken from European and American sources filling most of its columns. Hearn described it as a poor little sheet going no farther north than St. Louis.

He was offered the assistant-editorship; the leisure that he found for literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing with strange characters, invaluable as literary material—Creoles, Spaniards, Mexicans—all that curious, heterogeneous society peculiar to New Orleans.

If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and outcasts from the world of so-called respectability.

At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same roof as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious shrine. This was quite sufficient to associate his name with hers, and many were the unfounded rumours—Nemesis of the unfortunate episode with Althea Foley at Cincinnati—which floated northwards regarding the manner of his life.

Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry of ancient India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and emotion, the illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the Item by weird and mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds, considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own genius.

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 Japan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the office, "concocting devilment" for the Item, his Spanish lessons with José 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 entitled "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 passion for a great night with wine and women and music; but the wandering passion 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 Japan, Hearn declares, in answer to a panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his Japanese 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 Japan, 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 passing 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 Mitchell McDonald later, in Japan, 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 Japan. "The days come and go like muffled 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 pass silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their passage 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 entitled "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 Japanese 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 assign 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 hoary dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball," with its five windows and glass 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

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 attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed 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 Japanese 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 passages 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 titles, 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 illustrations 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 Mitchell 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 passages 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 pronounced 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 constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though you were passing 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 passage, 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 passage 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 Japan 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 Japan and of things Japanese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting." [14]

In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, 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 Kumamoto entitled "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 pronounced 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 Japan. "Far the nobler 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 surpassed, here and there expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when passing 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 phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are shimmering, a mass 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 brass 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, God, 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 association 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."

Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance. Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysanthême," Hearn retained the same admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaître or Anatole France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die, one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read 'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."

Hearn had a wonderful memory—he could repeat pages of poetry even of the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement, repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his soft musical voice.

A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement.

Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the Japanese kimono.

At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he was a much more responsible and important person than the little "brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office, turning out page after page of "copy" for the Cincinnati Enquirer, or doing the "night stations" for the Commercial. In later years, in consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes, the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always photographed in profile looking down.

In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice; seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much, and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected, companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly, he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion, tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious. Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting."

Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy, diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in the streets of Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step, singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional headgear for the enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel shirt, that he habitually wore.

Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do. "Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts! Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."

In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have nothing that was not of the best make and quality.

In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd, nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you came in contact with him.

CHAPTER XII

The affection between Jean Jacques Ampère and Madame Récamier is the one that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is reversed. Madame Récamier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity, shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him in the tussle of life.

Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his side.

"There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore, "whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement."

Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed conviction that her love—as love is understood in common parlance—could never be his.

And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not; she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a neophyte, also worshipped.

Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner, ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of journalistic work in New Orleans.

Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the Times Democrat. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed of what were known as "Hearn's admirers."

His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them all—love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of green hashisch.

One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse—

"My heart would hear her and beat
Had I lain for a century dead;—
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red."

The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the Times Democrat. There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years, wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic" was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitchell McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to the expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story in which I first used it—years and years ago. Don't return the thing—it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush."

Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French Impressionist school.

The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.

A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love, yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she, unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away forever.

Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron. Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who preserved freedom of thought and action—absolute quiet, silence, dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself in the mediocrity to which she belonged.

Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness, and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought, une jeune fille un peu farouche (no English word could give the same sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a particular variety of savage, that he could not understand—and was afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since then I have become grey and the father of three boys."

For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems, he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres françaises' (as Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy...."

Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her, mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom in the room—but in the future, which was black without stars!"

In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the Tertiary epoch—three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most ancient branch of humanity."

It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was written and contributed to Harper's Magazine under the title of "Torn Letters."

We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his genius and quickened his pen.

I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or Karma (as he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn—the Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.

In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the Cosmopolitan, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.

She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?

"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow, but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation—nothing but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case, this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever attempted, had appeared serially in Harper's Magazine, and he was occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches, the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details, that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being fragmentary and unfinished.

After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly, writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope.

"It is a formality—and you are you; and you are not a formality—but a somewhat—and I am only I." [15]