"I am conscious they are only trivial," wrote Lafcadio Hearn from New
Orleans in 1880 to his friend H. E. Krehbiel, speaking of the weird
little sketches he was publishing from time to time in the columns
of the _Daily Item_, the New Orleans newspaper which first gave him
employment in the city where he spent the ten years from 1877 to 1887.
"But I fancy," he goes on, "that the idea of the fantastics is
artistic. They are my impressions of the strange life of New Orleans.
They are dreams of a tropical city. There is one twin-idea running
through them all--Love and Death. And these figures embody the story
of life here, as it impresses me. I hope to be able to take a trip
to Mexico in the summer just to obtain literary material, sun-paint,
tropical color, etc. There are tropical lilies which are venomous, but
they are more beautiful than the frail and icy-white lilies of the
North. Tell me if you received a fantastic founded upon the story of
Ponce de Leon. I think I sent it in my last letter. I have not written
any fantastics since except one--inspired by Tennyson's fancy fancy--
"My heart would hear her and beat,
Had it lain for a century dead--
Would start and tremble under her feet--
And blossom in purple and red."
It was this "Fantastic," published first in the _Item_ on October 21,
1880, and later re-written in more ornate style and published in the
_Times-Democrat_ on April 6, 1884, under the title of "L'Amour après
la Mort," which is the only one of the weird little sketches that has
appeared in book form, outside of those which he himself republished in
_Stray Leaves from Strange Literature_, and _Some Chinese Ghosts._
For it was this one which he sent to a friend with the deprecatory
criticism that it "belonged to the Period of Gush" and the request "to
burn or tear it up after reading." He had merely enclosed it to show
how and when he had first used the phrase "lentor inexpressible" to
which his friend had objected.
"Fortunately his correspondent--as did most of those to whom he
wrote--treasured everything in his handwriting," says his biographer,
Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore, "and the fragment which bore--my
impression is--the title of 'A Dead Love' (the clipping lacks the
caption) remains to give an example of some of the work that bears the
flaws of his 'prentice hand, before he used his tools with the assured
skill of a master." And she quotes the strange, fanciful little sketch
in full, with the comment: "To his own, and perhaps other middle-aged
taste, 'A Dead Love' may seem negligible, but to those still young
enough, as he himself then was, to credit passion with a potency
not only to survive 'the gradual furnace of the world,' but even to
blossom in the dust of graves, this stigmatization as 'Gush' will seem
as unfeeling as always does to the young the dry and sapless wisdom
of granddams. To them any version of the Orphic myth is tinglingly
credible. Yearningly desirous that the brief flower of life may never
fade, such a cry finds an echo in the very roots of their inexperienced
hearts. The smouldering ardor of its style, which a chastened judgment
rejected, was perhaps less faulty than its author believed it to be in
later years."
"It was to my juvenile admiration for this particular bit of work,"
she goes on, "that I owed the privilege of meeting Lafcadio Hearn in
the winter of 1882, and of laying the foundation of a close friendship
which lasted without a break until the day of his death."
His linking of love with death in this and the other "Fantastics"
was in full accord with the sombre atmosphere of the trebly stricken
city to which he had come--a city with a glorious and a joyous past,
but just then ruined by three horrors:--recent war, misrule under the
carpet-baggers, and oft-recurring pestilence. He had come expecting
much from a semi-tropical environment. He found sorrow and trouble and
a wasted land; and his mood was soon in unison with the disastrous
elements around him. His letter to his friend Watkin when he first came
to this smitten Paradise shows how strong the impression was: "When
I saw it first--sunrise over Louisiana--the tears sprang to my eyes.
It was like young death--a dead bride crowned with orange flowers--a
dead face that asked for a kiss. I cannot say how fair and rich and
beautiful this dead South is. It has fascinated me. I have resolved to
live in it; I could not leave it for that chill and damp Northern life
again."
From the files of the _Item_ and the _Times-Democrat_ over a score of
these "Fantastics" have been gathered, and with them certain other
fanciful little sketches that seem worth preserving, though they do not
deal so directly with the mystic "twin-idea of Love and Death."
In his sympathetic Introduction to Hearn's _Leaves from the Diary of
an Impressionist_, Mr. Ferris Greenslet deplores the loss of that
collection of these "Fantastics" made by Hearn himself as one section
of the book he evidently planned to publish under the title _Ephemeræ,
or Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist._ Says Mr. Greenslet:
Apparently it was Hearn's intention to add to the "Floridian
Reveries" a little collection of "Fantastics," with such
savory titles as "Aïda," "The Devil's Carbuncle," "A
Hemisphere in a Woman's Hair," "The Fool and Venus," etc[1].
This group, however, is, unfortunately, lost. From the notebook labeled
upon its cover "Fantastics" many leaves have been cut, and there
remains only the paper on "Arabian Women."
But for the solitary copy of the files of the _Item_, preserved in the
office of that paper, most of these earliest bits of original fantasy
wrought by the shabby, eccentric young journalist, whose passion for
exquisite words was so incomprehensible to the other "newspaper boys,"
would have been wholly lost.
"The modest _Item_ goes no farther than St. Louis," wrote Hearn to
Krehbiel; and it was for this little two-page paper, too insignificant
at that time to be preserved even in the city archives or in the
public libraries, that he wrote most of the "tales of Love and Death"
reproduced in this volume. Twenty-nine out of the thirty-odd are to be
found only, so far as we know, in the brittle yellow pages of bound
volumes of the _City Item_, from June, 1878, to December, 1881, to
which we have been given access through the courtesy of the present
owners of the _New Orleans Item._ The other six, some of which were
rearrangements and paraphrases of earlier "Fantastics," appeared in
the _Times-Democrat_, of which several nearly complete files exist in
libraries.
Among these thirty-five brief but vitally imaginative sketches several
are far superior to "L'Amour après la Mort."
The "Fantastics" proper and the "Other Fancies" have been grouped
indiscriminately in chronological order, though differing greatly in
spirit and in excellence of style. "The Little Red Kitten" and "At the
Cemetery" are less labored in point of diction; but they are charming
in their simplicity and unaffected tenderness. In the earlier of these
little pictures his sympathy with our "poor brothers"--in this case
"sisters"--of the animal world, from first to last a striking trait in
his character, is beautifully expressed. There is delicate humor, too,
as well as pathos, in the sketch. In the latter we have the glow of
his feeling for the sorrow of a child, and the spring of his wonderful
imagination which a few handfuls of sand not native to the spot evoke.
In neither is there the least trace of the weird which is in so large
a degree characteristic of most of the others. Slight as they are in
texture, they seem to me to rise far above the more subtle and fanciful
tales in the strength and beauty of simple truth to nature--to the best
that was in his own nature.
But the others, notably "The Black Cupid," "The Undying One,"
"Aphrodite and the King's Prisoner," "The Fountain of Gold," "The
Gypsy's Story," are not to be undervalued. There is a power of vision,
an imaginative magnificence, a weird melody of word-music in them that
grips the mind of the reader as in a vise.
"The Fountain of Gold" was later reproduced in the form of "A Tropical
Intermezzo," recently given to a wider public in the pages of _Leaves
from the Diary of an Impressionist._ It is interesting to compare
the first sketch with the finished picture. The earlier work is less
dramatic, less convincing, less artistic, though full of a charm of its
own. The whole design is transmuted into something immensely effective
by the simple device of an equating the language of him who tells the
tale.
In a less degree the same thing may be remarked in the comparison of
"A Dead Love," written for the _Item_, and "L'Amour après la Mort,"
contributed to the _Times-Democrat._
In "The Tale of a Fan" may be traced, it seems to me, the germ of what
he later expanded or meant to expand into "A Hemisphere in a Woman's
Hair," which has not been found.
But it is not alone the charm that clings about all that is weird and
fanciful that gives value to this early work of Hearn's. It sheds rich
light upon one phase of his development and forms an essential part of
his biography; and it helps to furnish proof, along with much else of
varying form and excellence, that he put forth a vast deal of literary
effort in the years of his stay in New Orleans before his engagement
with the _Times-Democrat._
The extent and value of his work as literary editor of the _Item_ has
been wholly ignored by his biographers and critics. This is due largely
to the fact that the matter he selected for publication in his earlier
literary career was drawn from the _Times-Democrat._ But to those who
have gone carefully over the files of the _Item_ it is evident that he
did far more original work for that paper than for the other. His forte
was supposed by the editors of the _Times-Democrat_ to be translation,
and, with the exception of some striking editorials, his work for that
paper was mostly translation. Even the _Stray Leaves from Strange
Literatures_ and _Some Chinese Ghosts_ belong to that category.
Besides the "Fantastics," he wrote for the _Item_ many editorials on
a variety of subjects and many book reviews, dramatic criticisms, and
translations both from the French and the Spanish, as well as Creole
sketches and certain fanciful squibs illustrated with quaint original
designs distinctly akin to those that appear in _Letters from the
Raven._
But unquestionably his most remarkable contributions to the _Item_ were
the "Fantastics."
From a hint given him by a traveler's tale, by a trivial street
incident, by a couplet of verse, or a carven cameo in an antique shop,
by an old legend, or a few grains of sand, his genius was able to
create a series of vivid and mystical visions, more real to him and to
his readers than the political contests or the personal gossip which
fill the surrounding columns of print.
To discover these vibrant bits of poesy in their commonplace setting is
like finding rare and glorious orchids in the midst of the crowfoots
and black-eyed Susans that crowd the banquettes and gutters' edges of
our New Orleans streets.
"He hated the routine work, and was really quite lazy about it,"
testifies Colonel John W. Fairfax, former owner of the _Item_,
and Hearn's first New Orleans employer and friend. At the age of
seventy-two this genial old gentleman recalls many incidents of his
association with the eccentric young literary editor who for three
years and a half aided him and Mark F. Bigney in the task of filling
the columns of the unpretentious little paper which he had purchased
from the printers and tramp journalists who were its original
owners--for the _Item_ was started on a cooperative, profit-sharing
basis.
"Hearn was really quite lazy about his regular work," Colonel Fairfax
insists. "We had to prod him up all the time--stick pins in him, so to
speak. But when he would write one of his own little fanciful things,
out of his own head--dreams--he was always dreaming--why, then he would
work like mad. And people always noticed those little things of his,
somehow, for they were truly lovely, wonderful. 'Fantastics' he called
them."
It was Colonel Fairfax who deserves the credit of "discovering" Hearn
in New Orleans, when he applied, shabby and half-starved, at the _Item_
office for a job, just after he had written to his friend Watkin, June
14, 1878: "Have been here seven months and never made one cent in the
city. No possible prospect of doing anything in this town now or within
twenty-five years."
But his next letter (undated) says--and it is evident that the
impression he had made had secured him more than he had asked for:
"The day after I wrote you, I got a position (without asking for it) as
assistant editor on the _Item_, at a salary considerably smaller than
that I received on the _Commercial_, but large enough to enable me to
save half of it."
And the old gentleman appears still to regard the Hearn he recalls
with the sort of half-admiring, half-contemptuous, wholly marveling
affection which a fine healthy turkey-cock would feel for the "ugly
duckling" just beginning to reveal himself of the breed of swans.
Apparently he and Bigney allowed Hearn considerable latitude in his
choice and treatment of subject. The three years of his work in their
employ show bolder and more varied editorial comment, as well as five
or six times as many "Fantastics" as are to be found in the six years
of his work under the Bakers, and prove that the quality of his work
was already fine enough to justify Page Baker's choice of him for a
place on the staff of "the new literary venture."
How these strange little blossoms of Hearn's genius attracted the
admiration of lovers of beauty and won him fame and friends among
professional men and scholars is told most vividly in the words of
Dr. Rodolph Matas, now a surgeon of international reputation, who was
Hearn's friend and early foresaw his fame.
In those days [says he] I was not so busy as I am now, and
had more time to read the books I enjoyed, and to spend long
hours in talk with Hearn.
It was in the early eighties, I remember, that I knew him
first. Whitney, of the _Times-Democrat_, was a friend of
mine, and I asked him one day: "Who writes those wonderful
things--translations, weird sketches, and remarkable
editorials--in your paper?" And he told me, "A queer little
chap, very shy--but I'll manage for you to meet him."
I became editor of the _New Orleans Medical and Surgical
Journal_ in 1883, and it must have been shortly before this
that I first met Hearn. He was astonished to find that I
knew him so well--but then, you see, I had been reading
these "Fantastics" and his wonderful book-reviews and
translations, and his editorials on all sorts of unusual
subjects, for a long time.
He often came to me to get information about medical
points which he needed in some of his work. He was deeply
interested in Arabian studies at that time, and I was
able to give him some curious facts about the practice of
medicine among the Arabs, which happened to be exactly what
he was seeking. Not only did he read every book on Arabia
which he could find, but he actually practiced the Arabic
script, and he used to write me fantastic notes, addressing
me as if I had been an Arab chief.
His capacity for reading swiftly--for getting the heart
out of a book--was amazing. While others read sentences,
he read paragraphs, chapters--in the time it would take an
ordinary reader to finish a chapter, he would have read
the whole book. And this in spite of his defective vision.
With his one great near-sighted eye roving over the page,
he seemed to absorb the meaning of the author--to reach his
thought and divine his message with incredible rapidity.
He knew books so well--knew the habits of thought of their
writers, the mechanics of literature. His power of analysis
was intuitive. Swiftly as he read, it would be found on
questioning him afterward that nothing worth while had been
over-looked, and he could refer back and find any passage
unerringly.
Both in taste and temperament he was morbid, and in many
respects abnormal--in the great development of his genius
in certain directions, and also in his limitations and
deficiencies in other lines. His nature towered like a
cloud-topping mountain on one side, while on others it
was not only undeveloped--it was a cavity! I understood
this better, perhaps, than others of his friends, knowing
as I did the pathology of such natures, and for that
reason our intercourse was singularly free and candid,
for Hearn revealed himself to me with a frankness and
unconventionality which would have startled another. I
never judged him by conventional standards. I listened
to the brilliant, erratic, intemperate outpourings of
his mind, aware of his eccentricities without allowing
them to blind me to the beauty and value of his really
marvelous nature. For example, he would bitterly denounce
his enemies--or fancied enemies--for he had an obsession
of persecution--in language that was frightful to listen
to--inventing unheard-of tortures for those whom he deemed
plotters against him. Yet in reality he was as gentle and as
tender-hearted as a woman--and as passionately affectionate.
But there was an almost feminine jealousy in his nature,
too, and a sensitiveness that was exaggerated to a degree
that caused him untold suffering. He was singularly and
unaffectedly modest about his work--curiously anxious to
know the real opinion of those whose judgment he valued,
on any work which he had done, while impatient of flattery
or "lionizing." Yet with all his modesty he had, even
in those days of his first successes, a high and proud
respect for his work. He was too good a critic not to know
his value; and he consistently refused to cheapen it by
allowing it to appear in any second-rate medium--I mean,
any of his literary work, as distinct from the journalistic
matter he did for his daily bread. Nor would he lower
himself by criticizing any book or poem which he did not
consider worthy of his opinion. Thus he was obliged, in
spite of his kind nature, which impelled him to do anything
which a friend might ask, to refuse to criticize books of
inferior worth, and he was very firm and dignified about
such refusals. He would not debase his pen by using it on
inferior subjects.
At the time when I knew him best, he was already highly
esteemed by many who appreciated his great gifts, while
others regarded him with some jealousy and would gladly have
seen him put down. From the first I recognized his genius
so clearly that he used to laugh at me for my faith in his
future fame. For I would often predict that he would be
known to future generations as one of the great writers of
the century, though it was easy to foresee that he would not
receive full recognition in his lifetime.
And though he used to smile at my enthusiasm, he himself
felt, I am convinced, the same certainty as to the quality
of his gift, the ultimate fame that Fate held for him. It
was this that made him regard his work with a reverent
humility, and it was this that accounted in some degree for
his extraordinary shyness, which made him shrink from being
lionized or exploited by those who, at that time, would have
been glad enough to entertain him and make much of him,
for he had already begun to be quite an important literary
person in the circles here which cared for such matters.
But Hearn fled from social attentions as from the plague.
He was by nature suspicious and he loathed flattery and
pretense.
His sense of literary and artistic values was singularly
sure, and it has always seemed to me that it was
intuitive--a sort of instinctive feeling for beauty and
truth.
When he became acquainted with the work of Herbert
Spencer--through the enthusiasm of his friend Ernest Crosby
for that philosopher and for the Darwinian theory of
evolution, which we were all discussing with deep interest
at that time--he used that thinker's philosophy as a
foundation upon which to base his marvelous speculations as
to the ultimate development of the race and the infinite
truths of the universe. I used to listen in wonder while
he talked by the hour along these lines, weaving the most
beautiful and imaginative visions of what might be. For his
theory of the universe was essentially literary rather than
philosophical.
It was to Dr. Matas that "Chita" was dedicated, not only as a token of
the warm admiration and affection which the sensitive soul of Hearn
felt for the broad-minded young physician, but as an acknowledgment
of the help Dr. Matas had given him in gathering the material for the
setting of the story. The physician's cosmopolitan rearing and his
scattered practice among French, Spanish, and even Filipino settlers in
the region about Grand' Isle enabled him to give Hearn in each instance
the appropriate phraseology in the dialect of the people he was writing
about.
Some of the "Other Fancies" are noteworthy for special reasons. In
"A River Reverie" one gets an odd glimpse of Mark Twain reflected in
the personality of the dream-haunted Irish-Greek, who handles the
visit of the humorist in so unjournalistic a way. How ruthlessly
his recollections of the old river-captain would be excised by the
copy-reader of the modern newspaper!
In several of these sketches Hearn gives a picture of the horrors of
yellow fever which shows even more clearly than his letters how vivid
was the impression made on him by that summer of 1878, when he passed
through the epidemic with only an attack of the dengue, a mild form of
the tropical plague.
Others of these sketches show the influence of contact with Spanish
friends and acquaintances, and the strong longing for the tropics,
which seems to have lasted all his life.
"Aïda" is, of course, merely the story of the well-known opera by
Verdi. Hearn wrote for the _Item_, during the opera season of 1880,
brief outlines like this of the stories of several of the operas played
at the French Opera House that winter: this one is included in this
volume only because it is mentioned among the "Fantastics" in the
list given in Dr. George Gould's book, _Concerning Lafcadio Hearn._
"Hiouen-Thsang" is included for the same reason, as it is not strictly
a "Fantastic."
"The Devil's Carbuncle," besides being a translation, is not a
"Fantastic," according to Hearn's definition of the term: it is not a
story of love and death; it is a story of greed and death.
"The Post-Office" is much more breezy and out-of-doors than any of the
"Fantastics," and does not properly belong with them; but it is so
charming a sketch of his visit to Grand' Isle, the place which gave him
the material for his first successful original story, "Chita," that it
seems worth while to reproduce it.
It has been almost a commonplace, with writers treating of Hearn's
development, to date from this visit the beginnings of his interest
in far-away lands. But they mistake in assigning a late date for his
delight in the tropics and his longing for Japan. His articles in the
_Item_ years before go to show that from the first it was almost an
instinct with him to yearn for glimpses of the Orient and the Spanish
Main. Throughout the volume of the _Item_ for 1879 the column headed
"Odds and Ends" reveals his interest in Spanish-American countries. It
is generally shown in translated citations or quotations from _La Raza
Latina._
In finding these cameo-like studies buried in the pages of the
newspapers of a generation ago, and in identifying them beyond
question as Hearn's, I have been aided by Mr. John S. Kendall and by my
daughter, Ethel Hutson, who have been for some years gathering traces
of Hearn's journalistic activities in New Orleans. To Mr. C. G. Stith,
of the _New Orleans Item_, we are indebted for the finding of the first
two or three of the "Fantastics" in that paper, after we had located
Hearn's work in the _Times-Democrat._
To one who has studied his way of expressing himself in his imaginative
writings the internal evidence would be quite enough to prove that
these "Fantastics" were woven in the brain-cells of Lafcadio Hearn. But
in addition to this we have the avowal of the editor-in-chief of the
_Item_, elicited by the praise of the _Claiborne Guardian._[2]
The author named them only "Fantastics." We have given to each its
separate title, as indicated by the most striking feature in the story.
To the "Other Fancies," which we have included in the collection, he
gave the titles under which they now appear, and some of them he signed.