Lafcadio Hearn

After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional life.

During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies for his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years.

The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a word:—

"Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed solid was breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very foolish—made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the Unknown for Art's sake,—or rather, you must obey them. The Spahi's fascination by the invisible forces was purely physical. I think I am right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance compelling another change.

"The carriage—no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I shan't put anybody's name to it." [16]

In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia.

On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to call at the office of the Cosmopolitan Magazine. On her arrival at eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss Bisland consented.

After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she published her experiences in the Cosmopolitan Magazine. These contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period.

Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return. He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never audible in dreams.

In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in the Tribune there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,—an absurd sense of absolute loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for you to win your race—so that every one may admire you still more, and your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your portrait—in spite of you—appear in some French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..."

I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face.

"It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you—all the Me's that were—keep asking the Me that is, for something always refused;—and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot see—you can only feel; and I can see,—and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,—and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come—and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ... what was it?

"Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of it,—just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly exposed.... Will you ever be like that always for any one being?—I hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the leaves."

Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and she married Mr. Wetmore.

Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between the time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the jeune fille un peu farouche, who in distant New Orleans days had understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's unsophisticated enthusiasm. She had written to him, and he gives her a whimsically pathetic answer, touching on memories, on thoughts, on aspirations, which had been a closed book for so long a period of time, and now, when re-opened, was seen to be printed as clearly on mind and heart as if he had parted with her but an hour before.

About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September, 1904—the month in which he died—comes his last. He tells her that to see her handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was a great pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was undeserved. He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese Miscellany" which he had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its way, and perhaps you will later on find no reason to be sorry for your good opinions of the writer. I presume that you are far too clever to believe more than truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a few estimable people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...."

He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing to her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear in book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects and flowers, and queer small things—and leave the subject of the destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof.

"May all good things ever come to you, and abide."

It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years, that he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any affection or sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may read," is this record of a devotion and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a century, lasting intact through fair years and foul, through absence, change of scene, even of nationality.

"Fear not, I say again; believe it true
That not as men mete shall I measure you...."

Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for the estimation of human character and genius.

CHAPTER XIII

One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.

The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest mind that this world has yet produced—the mind that systematised all human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a sun."

Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with the offending individual.

"A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of tingling shock,—a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity—all sensed existences—are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...."

This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of things—a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,—and from that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had appeared before.

It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature. Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately, moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it, "Equilibration,"—a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were eliminated.

These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.

In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy—'the rest is silence!'"

It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn, in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.

Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty." The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.

Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied.

It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.

Invariably the best critic of his own nature—"Truly we have no permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods—at compound interest!"

There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him lying on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a pantheist.

After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though he confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a Russian Mass would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Mass, interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II.

In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy, contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise Shintoism and Buddhism with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer. Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement that "ancestor worship was the root of all religion." Cut off from communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, asserting that the worship of natural objects—not spirit or ancestor worship—was the beginning of the religious sentiment in man.

It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead. From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found Spencer declaring that ancestor worship, the influence of spirits or ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same idea. "The real religion of Japan," he says in his essay on the ancient cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor worship.' Patriotism belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears the approval of ghostly witnesses."

Mr. Robert Young, editor of the Japan Chronicle, and Mr. W. B. Mason, who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of Japanese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor worship.

The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness—arguing by analogy, it is not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn describes for "millions long buried"—for "the nameless dead."

Nature worship, the worship of the sun, that gave its name to the ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the ancient Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their "ancestral spirits."

In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most ancient Japanese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn in Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the scientific theory of evolution.

"He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,—Buddhism in particular,—which history has engrafted on the æsthetic heart of Japan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound,—a compound so rare as to have introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before. More than any other living author he has added a new thrill to our intellectual experience."

When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori, where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought—you will perchance be shown a wonderful fabric minutely intersected with delicate traceries on a dark-coloured texture. If you are accompanied by any one who is acquainted with ancient Japanese embroidery, they will show you that these traceries are fine Japanese ideographs; poems, proverbs, legends, embroidered by the laying on of thread by thread all over the tissue, producing a most harmonious and beautiful effect. Thus did Hearn, like these ancient artificers, weave ancient theories of pre-existence and Karma into spiritual fantasies and imaginations. Ever in consonance with wider interests his work opened up strange regions of dreamland, touched trains of thought that run far beyond the boundaries of men's ordinary mental horizon. In his sketch, for instance, called the "Mountain of Skulls," [17] how weirdly does he make use of the idea of pre-existence. A young man and his guide are pictured climbing up a mountain, where was no beaten path, the way lying over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments.

Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull crashings.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth that was not stone—and lifted it—and was startled by the cheekless gibe of death.

In his inimitable way, Hearn tells how the dawn breaks, casting a light on the monstrous measureless height round them. "All of these skulls and dust of bones, my son, are your own!" says his guide. "Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires."

The Buddhist idea of pre-existence has been believed in by orientals from time immemorial; in the Sacontala the Indian poet, Calidas, says: "Perhaps the sadness of men, in seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music, arises from some remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence." The idea has been re-echoed by many in our own time, but by none more exquisitely and fancifully than by Lafcadio Hearn.

In one of his sketches, entitled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies, the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines.

"The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,—that the mystery was of other existences than mine." [18]

Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution—created by experiences of vanished being more countless than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark the sadness only lingered—unutterable—profound.

CHAPTER XIV

Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds, "that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a horrible nightmare, that he had been a demophobe for years, hating crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help it;—just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,—to see no one except you and Joe."

It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment and feeling must have arisen between them in that space of ten years, subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters transmitted across thousands of miles.

Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn, Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion.

Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths and Vandals—and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that claims art merit by a Gothic standard.

From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on the other hand—no musician from a technical point of view—frankly declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's sonata or an opera by Wagner.

Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "Hearn and Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions, by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The glissando effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal splinterings.' They had for him a great charm."

Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the Cosmopolitan Magazine. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see her. "Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you—but since you live in Hell what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison.

To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him, so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the Barracouta for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared originally in Harper's Monthly. It was afterwards incorporated in his larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies."

Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics, is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced enthusiasms.

He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and, unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no snobs; everything primitive and morally pure. Confound fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms distilled Elixir Vitæ."[19]

There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friendship, the two comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion.

During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on board the Barracouta, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird atmosphere, that make his Japanese books so arresting and original, is a delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep," written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:—

"Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people. On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often be startled by something you feel, rather than hear behind you,—surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb oscillations of raiment,—and ere you can turn to look, the haunter swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."

"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated

"A mon cher ami,

"LÉOPOLD ARNOUX

"Notaire à Saint Pierre, Martinique.

"Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des sympathies échangées, de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle à l'âme au doux Pays des Revenants."

Arnoux is mentioned subsequently in one or two of Hearn's letters. He alludes to suppers eaten with him at Grande Anse, in a little room opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of the sea, with the great voice thundering outside so that they could scarcely hear themselves speak, and the candle in the verrine fluttering like something afraid.

In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly after the great eruption of Mt. Pelée that destroyed Saint Pierre, he alludes to Arnoux' garden, and speaks of a spray of arborescent fern that had been sent him. In the fragment, also, called "Vanished Light," he describes the amber shadows and courtyard filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. A little boy and girl run to meet him, and the father's voice, deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell, calls from an inner doorway, "Entrez donc, mon ami!" "But all this was—and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city; never again will its ways be trodden, never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams."

Hearn definitely left Martinique in 1889, bound for America; having completed the task he had undertaken to do. Much as he loved the lazy, easy tropical life, "the perfumed peace of enormous azured noons, and the silent flickering of fire-flies through the lukewarm distance, the turquoise sky and the beautiful brown women," he began, before the end of his stay, to acknowledge that the resources of intellectual life were lacking; no libraries, no books in any language; a mind accustomed to discipline became, he said, like a garden long uncultivated, in which rare flowers returned to their primitive savage forms, smothered by rank, tough growths, which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. "Nature does not allow serious study or earnest work, and if you revolt against her, she leaves you helpless and tortured for months. One must not seek the Holy Ghost, the world is young here,—not old and wise and grey as in the North.... The material furnished by the tropics could only," he said, "be utilised in a Northern atmosphere...." The climate numbed mental life, and the inspiration he hoped for wouldn't come.

During his stay in New York, while preparing "Youma" (a story written in the West Indies) for press and going over the proofs of "Chita" before its appearance in book form, he seems to have been in a pitiable state of destitution, obliged to make a translation of Anatole France's "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" to keep bread in his mouth.

"So you read my translation of 'Sylvestre Bonnard?'" he says to his sister, writing from Japan. "I made it in two weeks, the Publishers paying me only $100. Of course the translation was too quickly done to be very good. I could not have written it all in the prescribed time, so a typewriter was hired for me. She was a pretty girl and I almost fell in love with her."

In 1889, Hearn made that ill-advised visit to Philadelphia, to Dr. George Milbury Gould. He had only known this gentleman hitherto through an interchange of letters. Gould had written to him at New Orleans, expressing delight with some of Hearn's translations from the French, upon which Hearn, in his usual impulsive way rushed into a correspondence. This was in April, 1887. Gould had written several pamphlets on the subject of myopia and defective sight, these he sent to Hearn, and Hearn had responded, touching, as usual, on every sort of philosophical and literary subject. When he returned to the United States, after his two years in the French West Indies, he thought he would like to consult Gould on the subject of his eyesight. He therefore wrote, suggesting that if a quiet room could be found for him in Philadelphia he would try his luck there.

Gould's account of his first appearance in his consulting-room is familiar to all who have read his book. "The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that he would certainly have run out of the house if by a tone of voice I had betrayed any curiosity or a doubt." [20]