generous letter, I doubt whether you could fully comprehend the value of
it to myself,--the value of literary encouragement from an evidently
strong source. There is nothing an author or an artist needs so
much,--nothing that is more difficult to obtain.
After all, the reward for him who strives to express beauty or truth,
for its own sake, is just such a letter as yours; for his aim is only to
reach and touch that kindred _something_ in another which the Christian
calls Soul,--the Pantheist, God,--the philosopher, the Unknowable.
Your wish as to the application to modern themes of the same literary
methods is about to be accomplished. I do not know how the work will be
received by the public, nor can I tell just when it will appear; but I
_think_ soon, and in _Harper's Magazine_ (entre nous!). If it appears
subsequently (or immediately) in more enduring form, I shall show my
gratefulness by sending you a copy.
Believe me, very sincerely,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
NEW ORLEANS, April, 1887.
DEAR MR. GOULD,--You could not have done me more pleasure than by
sending me your pamphlet on the "Colour-Sense." I am an Evolutionist,
and as thorough a disciple of Spencer as it is possible for one not a
practical scientist to be; and such studies, combined with art and
poetry, with which they serve in my case to stimulate and illustrate and
expand, are my delight. I like your criticism on Grant Allen, too. In
his "Physiological Æsthetics," as well as in "Common-Sense in Science"
and various other volumes, he has occasionally made singularly wild
divergences from the perfectly smooth path he professes to
travel--tumbled into imaginative thickets, lost himself in romantic
groves. Still he is, as you observe, more than interesting sometimes;
delightful, suggestive, skilled in giving a charming homeliness and
familiarity to new truths vast as the sky.
The pamphlet on retinal insensibility I have not yet read through; and I
fear some parts of it will prove too technical for me. But its larger
conclusions and elucidations impress me already sufficiently to tell me
that a more complete grasp of it will more than please and surprise.
My novelette is complete and in a publisher's hands. When you read the
first part, whether in the _Magazine_ or in book form,--I think you will
find much of what you have said regarding the Æsthetic Symbolism of
Colour therein expressed, intuitively,--especially regarding the
holiness of the sky-colour,--the divinity of Blue. Blue is the
World-Soul.
With grateful regards,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
NEW ORLEANS, 1887.
DEAR MR. GOULD,--Reading your letter, I was strongly impressed by the
similarity in thought, inspiration, range, even chirography, with the
letters of a very dear friend, almost a brother, and also a
physician,--though probably less mature than you in many ways. A greater
psychological resemblance I have never observed. My friend is very
young, but already somewhat eminent here;--he has been demonstrator of
anatomy for some years at our University, and will ultimately, I am
sure, turn out a great name in American medicine. But he is a
Spaniard,--Rodolfo Matas. I first felt really curious about him after
having visited him to obtain some material for a fantastic anatomical
dream-sketch, and asked where I could find good information regarding
the lives and legends of the great Arabian physicians. When he ran off a
long string of names, giving the specialties of each man, and
criticizing his work, I was considerably surprised; and even felt a
little skeptical until I got hold of Leclerc and Sprengel and found the
facts there as given to me by word of mouth. I trust you will meet him
some day, and find in him an ideal _confrère_, which I am sure he would
find in you. It is a singular fact that most of my tried friends have
been physicians.
You asked me about Gautier. I have read and possess nearly all his
works; and before I was really mature enough for such an undertaking I
translated his six most remarkable short stories: ("Une Nuit de
Cléopâtre;" "La Morte Amoureuse;" "Arria Marcella;" "Le Pied de Momie;"
"Le Roi Candaule;" and "Omphale"), which were published by R.
Worthington under the title of the opening story,--"One of Cleopatra's
Nights." The work contains, I regret to say, several shocking errors;
and the publisher refused me the right to correct the plates. The book
remains one of the sins of my literary youth; but I am sure my judgement
of the value of the stories was correct, and if ever able I shall try to
get out a new and correct edition. Of Sainte-Beuve I have read very
little--found him silver-grey. Most of the Romantic school I have. If
you like Gautier, how much more would you like the work of Julien Viaud
(Pierre Loti). We know each other by letter. Read "Le Roman d'un Spahi"
first; I think it will astonish you. Then "Le Mariage de Loti;" then
"Fleurs d'Ennui." All his work, which has already won, even for so young
a man, the highest encomium of the Academy, and the Vitel prize, is
extraordinary; but my dislike of grey skies, fogs and ice, causes me to
find less pleasure in "Mon Frère Yves," and "Pêcheur d'Islande," though
there are superb tropical pages scattered through the latter.
I send you a little Arabian story, which I wrote for _Harper's Bazar_
last winter, and which I will reproduce some day in another shape, if I
live to complete my Arabian plan. Perhaps you are familiar with the
legend.
You will be glad to hear my novelette has been purchased by the
_Magazine_. So that I may ultimately hope to be able to leave
journalism alone. It is not arduous work for me; but I am a
thorough demophobe, and it compels me to meet many disagreeable
experiences,--experiences which often result in absolute nervous
prostration caused wholly by annoyance. You can imagine the difficulties
of creating artistic things only in the intervals of a long succession
of petty troubles. Such troubles would be absurd to most minds, but to
me they are horribly serious: I have a badly-balanced nervous make-up.
Next week I go away to hunt up some tropical or semi-tropical
impressions. The _Atlantic_ has given me some attention, and I am going
to try to make a sketch for them.
Yours must be a very remarkable mind: I was greatly impressed by the
plan and purpose and admirable instructive excellence of that optic
model you sent me the circular of. In fact, I feel very small when I
compare the work of my fancy with the work of such knowledge as yours.
Still I have the power to give you pleasure, which is quite a
consolation.
Believe me very truly, your friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P.S. Are you inclined to believe in a further evolution of the
colour-sense? Spencer, in vol. II "Biology," is rather conservative as
to the further prospects of _physical evolution_, although I suppose
further moral evolution must necessitate a further progress in the
nervous system.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
NEW ORLEANS, 1887.
In reply to nearly all the questions about my near-sightedness, I might
answer, "Yes." Had the best advice in London. Observe all the rules you
suggest. Glasses strain the eye too much--part of retina is gone. Other
eye destroyed by a blow at college; or rather by inflammation consequent
upon blow. Can tell you more about myself when I see you, but the result
will be more curious than pleasing. Myopia is not aggravating.
I knew you were going to have thorough success;--you will do far better
than you think. Wish I had the opportunity to study medicine, or rather,
the ability to be a good physician. Ah! to have a profession is to be
rich, to have international current-money, a gold that is cosmopolitan,
passes everywhere. Then I think I would never settle down in any place;
would visit all, wander about as long as I could. There is such a
delightful pleasantness about the _first_ relations with people in
strange places--before you have made any rival, excited any ill will,
incurred anybody's displeasure. Stay long enough in any one place and
the illusion is over: you have to sift this society through the meshes
of your nerves, and find perhaps one good friendship too large to pass
through. To be a physician, an architect, an engineer,--anything that
makes one capable of supplying to a universal or cosmopolitan want, is a
great capital. Next to this, a good tradesman is worthy of envy: he may
feel as much at home in Valparaiso as in New York; in Bangkok as in
Paris.
Apropos of a medical novel, again,--have you had occasion to remark the
fact that among the French, every startling discovery in medicine or
those sciences akin to medicine, is almost immediately popularized by a
capital story? The best of those I have seen appeared in the _Revue
Politique et Littéraire_ and in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The
evolution of electricity by the human body suggested a powerful but very
Frenchy sketch in the former some years ago, which appeared
concomitantly with those theatrical exhibitions of a famous "electrical
woman." Then there was one dealing with the super-refinement of the five
senses, particularly vision and smell,--entitled "Un Fou." The
researches of Charcot and others into hypnotism and its phenomena,
doubtless suggested "Une Tresse Blonde" in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.
It is always a safe and encouraging thing to trace one's ancestral
history, supposing one be very philosophical. In your case it is. A fine
physical and mental man can feel sure from the mere fact of his
comparative superiority that he has something to thank his ancestors
for. But suppose the man be small, puny, sickly, scrofulous,--the
question of ancestry becomes unpleasant. We are far ahead of Tristram
Shandy, nowadays; the inferiority of the homunculus is no mere matter of
accident or interruption. How depressing some knowledge is, and how
little philosophy betters the situation some discoveries bring about.
Take such an example as this: a nice, sweet girl, full of physical
attractiveness, grace, freshness, with a delicious disposition,
fascinates you, you think of marriage. Somebody tells you the mother and
grandmother both went mad. How much of a change in your admiration is
produced by this simple fact. I saw this feeling put into practice. A
Southern planter--splendid man!--was asked for his daughter's hand by a
gentleman of the neighbourhood, whose grandfather had committed a
terrible crime. The young man was wealthy, accomplished, steady, brave,
had the best of reputations and was liked by the girl. The father
refused him frankly for the simple reason that he had in his veins some
of the blood of a great criminal.
It must have struck you, if you have studied Buddhism--(not "esoteric
Buddhism," which is damnable charlatanism!)--how the tenets of that
great faith are convertible into scientific truths in the transforming
crucible of the new philosophy. The consequence of the crime or the
sacrifice in the forming of the future personality; the heights
attainable by discipline, of indifference to external things; the duty
and holiness of the extinction of the _Self_; the monstrous allegory of
the physical metempsychosis, which is the shadow of a tremendous truth;
the supreme Buddha-hood which is the melting into the infinite life,
light, knowledge, and the peace of the immensities: science gives an
harmonious commentary upon all these, which it refuses to the more
barbarous faith of the Occident. All that is noble in the Christianity,
too much boasted of, belongs also to the older and vaster dream of the
East--is perchance a dim reflection of it; the possibility of the
invasion of the Oriental philosophy into the Occident seems to me worthy
of consideration. In the meanwhile, it is unfortunate that such apes as
the ---- should parade their detestable _macaqueries_ as Buddhism and
obtain such hosts of hearers.
Speaking of the sexual sense being "such an infernal liar," there are
reasons that lead me to doubt whether it is _all_ a liar. I think it
never tells a _physical_ lie. It only tells an ethical one. The physical
memory of the most worthless woman that ever ensnared a man vibrates
always afterward with a thrill of pleasure. But that is not really what
I intended to say: I want to know if there be any scientific explanation
of this fact. A woman wicked enough to tempt a man to cut his mother's
throat _may_ have a peculiar physical magnetism. The touch of her hand
in passing, the character of a look from her,--although she be
ugly,--may be irresistible, damning. A good woman, beautiful, graceful,
infinitely her physical superior, may have no such charm for the same
man. Here is a mystery I cannot explain. This phenomenon is especially
noticeable in the tropics, where differences of race and race mixture
produce astounding sexual variations. Never was there a huger stupidity
than the observation that "all women are in one respect alike." On the
contrary, in that one respect they differ infinitely, inexplicably,
diabolically, fantastically.
L. H.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
NEW ORLEANS, 1887.
DEAR MR. GOULD,--I posted a letter, thanking you for two treatises so
kindly sent, just before receiving your note. Be sure that I will find
it no small pleasure to have a chat with a brother-thinker, if I find
myself in Philadelphia this summer.
To the best of my recollection the book you speak of is a small, thin
volume which only pretends to be a synopsis of the most gigantic of
existing epics--the Mahabharata excepted. There are three complete
translations of the colossal Ramayana:--The Italian version of Gorresio,
I think in ten vols.; the French prose one by Hippolyte Fauche in nine,
which I have read; and the exceedingly tiresome English translation (now
O. P.) by Griffith, in Popish verse. It was, I think, on this last that
"The Iliad of the East" was based--a very poor effort, artistically.
These epics are simply inexhaustible mines of folk-lore and
legend,--like the Kathā-sarit-Sāgara. But one gets cloyed soon. It
requires the patience of a Talmudist to work in these huge masses to get
out a diamond or two. But diamonds there are. You know that mighty
pantheistic hymn, the "Bhagavad-Gita," is but a little fragment of the
Mahabharata;--also the story of Nala, so beautifully translated by
Monier Williams, Arnold, and the wonderful dead Hindoo girl, Toru Dutt,
who wrote English and French as well as Hindustani and Sanscrit, made
also some exquisite renderings. All you could wish for in this
direction has not indeed been done; but it will take a hundred years to
do it.
I am only a dilettante, not a linguist; and I only try to familiarize
myself with the aspect of a national Idea as manifested in these epics.
Some day I shall try to offer the public a little volume dealing with
the Old Arabic spirit--pre-Islamic and post-Islamic. The poetry of the
desert is Homeric. And I don't know but that for pure _natural_ poetry,
the great Finnish Kalewala is not more wonderful than the Indian epics.
When I made my brief renderings from the French edition of 1845, I was
not familiar with the completion of the work by the labours of Loennrot.
Pardon long letter. You and I may have a good chance to talk these
things over later on.
Very cordially yours,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
NEW ORLEANS, 1887.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--At the time your letter reached me, the few proofs
sent had been given away;--I have not many friends, of course, but I did
not have many proofs either. The best I can therefore do is to send
original photo. This is taking a liberty, I suppose, to send what wasn't
asked for; but it is the best I can do, and you can pitch it away if you
don't want it.
My novelette is done, and I am waiting to hear of its fate before
starting. I am sure you will like it, and recognize a good deal of the
scenery. I do not know how long I shall stay in New York;--might only
stay a very short time, but quite long enough to see you once,--for a
little while. Then again I might take a notion to stay in the
North--don't really know what I shall do.
What would be nice, if one could manage it, would be to live in the
country, or in some vast wilderness, and ship one's work away. But I
fear that will only be possible when I have become Ancient as the
Moon,--if I should ever become ancient.
Very truly,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P. S. I met no more Hindoos here, but I met some other singular beings.
My last pet was a Chinese doctor, whose name I cannot pronounce. He
tried to teach me Chinese; but I discovered nasal tones almost
impossible to imitate,--snarling sounds like the malevolent outcries of
contending cats.... "Gha!--ho-lha! Koum Yada! Gha! ghwang hwa!--yow
sum!" Under the placid _naïveté_ of a baby, my Chinese tutor concealed a
marvellous comprehension of human motives and of human meannesses. He
observed like a judge, and smiled always--always, with the eternal,
half-compassionate, half-divine smile of the images of Fo.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
NEW ORLEANS, 1887.
DEAR KREHBIEL,--All that is now delaying me is news from the Harpers
which I am waiting for. I have sent on my completed novelette,--an
attempt at treatment of modern Southern life in the same spirit of
philosophic romance as the "Ghosts" attempted to exemplify,--an effort
to reach that something in the reader which they call Soul, God, or the
Unknowable, according as the thought harmonizes with Christian,
Pantheistic, or Spencerian ideas, without conflicting with any. Of
course, I am a little anxious over this parturition;--have no idea how
it is going to impress Alden. In a week from this date I expect to hear
from him. Then I will be able to go.
Of course, New York is a horrible nightmare to me. I have been a
demophobe for years,--dread crowds and hate unsympathetic characters
most unspeakably. I have only been once to a theatre in New Orleans; to
hear Patti sing, and I got out after she had sung one song. I can't be
much of a pleasure to any one. Here I visit a few friends steadily for a
couple of 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.
There are one or two I shall have to visit; but I shall take care to
make those visits just before leaving town.
Your suggestion about the catalogue was so kind, that I don't know how
to thank you. What bothers me about it are the following points:--
1. If the collection is a large one, seems to me that each department
should be entrusted to a specialist. Japanese armourers-work alone
demands that. You know what Damascus-steel means in literary and
scientific research; and the Japanese artisans surpassed the world in
such work. Then porcelains, lacquers, inlaid work, pictured books,
goldsmithery, etc. I know nothing about these things.
2. The Japanese expert may have simply confined himself to titles,
dates, names;--or have made explanatory text as fitting and dry as
possible. If he has, I don't see how a _unique_ catalogue could be made.
The only way it could be made, I imagine, would be to make explanatory
text picturesque and rich in anecdote; which would require immense
reading, and purchase of many expensive books on the subject of art and
history--De Rosny, Gonse, Metchnikoff, etc. Oriental art is one of the
things I can never afford to study. It costs too much--the luxury of a
rich dilettante.
3. Seems to me such a work would require at least six months to do at
all, a whole year to do well. Don't think I could afford to do it. I
cannot write or read at night. If it were simply a question of
translation and arrangement, it would be done soon; and I would need
only a few technical and art treatises, some of which I already have....
* * * * *
I need rest and change a while,--not that I feel sick, but the continual
fight with malaria leaves a fellow's nerves terribly slack, like the
over-strained chords of a--well, better leave the rest of the simile to
you.... I don't know whether the "Ghosts" walk; but I have been told it
did me much good in Boston literary circles. The publishers voluntarily
made a 5-years'--10 per cent--contract with me; but I have not heard
from them. Notices were very contradictory outside of New York and
Boston. Some said the stories were literal translations; others said
they were fabrications, without any Chinese basis; others said the book
was obscene; others called it "exquisitely spiritual,"--in short, the
critics didn't seem to know what to make of it. Three lines in the
_Atlantic_ consoled me amply for naughty Western criticism.
You may expect to hear _definitely_ from me very soon,--at latest, I
suppose, ten days.
Affectionately,
L. HEARN.
Have you any idea how big a catalogue it ought to be?--if 100, 200, 300
pp. 16mo? Would it be indexed generally, or by departments,--duplex or
single? Five pp. a day on such a job would be work. Then rewriting at
rate of 10 pp. per day. All supposing that no research or elaborated
treatment of incident were required,--only description and explanation.
I've had to open envelope to ask another question: Does he want the
catalogue written in _French_? Because if he does, I wouldn't attempt
it. No one but a Frenchman, or some rare men like Rossetti and
Swinburne can write artistic French. I can't write French with delicacy
and correctness.
Or does he simply want bad French turned into good English?
My experience is this. Translation--except for an artistic motive, and
with ample leisure--never pays, either in self-satisfaction or anything
else. Cataloguing, pure and simple, is the most terrible and tiresome of
earthly labours;--first notebook and eyes; then arrangement of amplified
notes by "a's" and "b's;" then enveloping or boxing, and pasting, then
rewriting; then, O God!--the proofs!
I know how to do it, but it is so much _life_ thrown away--so much
thought-time made sterile. In this case the chief compensation would be
opportunity to study the phases of Japanese art,--the _esprit_.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
NEW YORK, 1887.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--A small creature rang the bell at 136 Madison
Avenue. A large and determined concierge responded, and the following
converse ensued:--
S. C.--"Miss Bisland--?"
C.--"No, sir!"
S. C.--"Miss E-liz-a-beth Bisland--?"
C.--"No, sir!"
S. C.--"Isn't this 136 Madison Avenue?"
C.--"Yes.--Used to live here.--Moved."
S. C.--"Do you not know where--?"
C.--"No, sir."
S. C.--"None of her friends or relatives here, who could tell me?"
C.--"No!"
The sudden closing of the door here made a Period and a Finis.
Then I wandered away down a double row of magnificent things that seemed
less buildings than petrifactions,--astonishments of loftiness and
silent power,--and wondered how Miss Elizabeth Bisland must have felt
when she first trod these enormous pavements and beheld these colossal
dreams of stone trying to touch the moon. And reaching my friend
Krehbiel's house I made this brief record of my vain effort to meet the
grey eyes of E. B.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, 1887.
DEAR KREHBIEL,--I was delighted to get your letter, the first which
reached me from America during my trip. My own correspondence has been
irregular, though I have written a good many short letters; but the
amount of work on my hands has been something enormous,--and I have only
had five idle days, caused by a fever due to imprudence. I got into a
marshy town, got wet, and came home with a burning headache. The result
was not serious except that I had to stop all writing for a while.
You ask me to send you a hint about my work; but I think it were best to
say nothing about it. I have a very large mass of MS. prepared, and
don't yet know what I am going to do with it: it is not polished as I
should wish, but I hope to work it into proper shape in a few days more.
It consists simply of a detailed account of impressions, sensations,
colours, etc. I have tried to put the whole _feeling_ of the trip on
paper. Then I have about $60 worth of photos to illustrate it. My photo
set is very complete;--I have also a rich collection of Coolie and
half-breed types, including many nude studies.
Strange as you may think it, this trip knocks the poetry out of me! The
imagination is not stimulated, but paralyzed by the satiation of all its
aspirations and the realization of its wildest dreams, The artistic
sense is numbed by the display of colours which no artist could paint;
and the philosophical sense is lulled to inactivity by the perpetual
current of novel impressions, by the continual stream of unfamiliar
sensory experiences. Concentration of mind is impossible.
It pleases me, however, to have procured material for stories, which I
can write up at home; and for romantic material the West Indies offer an
unparalleled field of research. I shall return to them again at my
earliest opportunity;--the ground is absolutely untilled, and it is not
in the least likely that anybody in the shape of a Creole is ever going
to till it.
[Illustration: SAINT-PIERRE AND MT. PELÉE BEFORE THE ERUPTION]
By this time you will have seen the doll. I want to remind you that this
is more than a doll; it is really an artistic model of the dress worn by
the women of Martinique,--big earrings and all. The real earrings and
necklaces are pure gold; the former worth 175 francs a pair; the latter
often running as high as 500, 600, even 900 francs.
In case this reaches you before leaving New York, I hope you will be
able to make some arrangement with Joe or somebody, so that I can put my
things in a place of safety for a day or two, until I can try to arrange
matters with the Harpers. I will be obliged to stay a short while in New
York,--and shall want a room badly, until my MS. and photos have been
disposed of, and my proof-reading has been done on "Chita." With
affectionate regards to all,
Very truly yours,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P. S. I return with the Barracouta.
My inquiries about the Marimba and other instruments have produced no
result except the discovery that our negroes play the guitar, the flute,
the flageolet, the cornet-à-piston! Some play very well; all the
orchestras and bands are coloured. But the civilized instrument has
killed the native manufacture of aboriginalities. The only hope would be
in the small islands, or where slavery still exists, as in Cuba, There
are one or two African songs still current, but they are sung to the
tam-tam--
Welleli, welleli,
hm, hm!
Papa mon ce papa mon
hm, hm!
Welleli, welleli,
hm, hm!
Maman mon ce maman mon
hm, hm!
Welleli, etc.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA, July, 1887.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--I suppose you will have just a tiny little bit of
curiosity to know about my impressions here? They have been all
flavoured with that enchanting sensation which artists term _surprise_.
The effect upon me has been such that I think the North will always look
torpid to me,--as a benumbed and livid part of our planet. Nearly all
these isles are volcanic; and this largely accounts for the green and
purple symmetry of their shapes. The colours are of the kind called
"impossible;"--and the days have such an azure expansion, so enormous a
luminosity that it does not really seem to be _our_ sky above, but the
heaven of some larger world.
That's all I can attempt to say about it now (in a general way) without
wearying you.
Imagine old New Orleans, the dear quaint part of it, young and idealized
as a master-artist might idealize it,--made all tropical, with narrower
and brighter streets, all climbing up the side of a volcanic peak to a
tropical forest, or descending in terraces of steps to the sea;--fancy
our Creole courts filled with giant mangoes and columnar palms (a
hundred feet in height sometimes); and everything painted in bright
colours, and everybody in a costume of more than Oriental
picturesqueness;--and astonishments of half-breed beauty;--and a grand
tepid wind enveloping the city in one perpetual perfumed caress,--fancy
all this, and you may have a faint idea of the sweetest, queerest,
darlingest little city in the Antilles: _Saint-Pierre_, Martinique. I
hope it will be my residence for the next two months,--and for the
latter part of my wretched little existence. I love it as if it were a
human being.
Outside are queer little French islands, with queer names--_Marie
Galante_ is rather an old appellation for an island,--full of Cytherean
suggestion.
We leave this very fantastic and unhealthy land--now smitten with
Gold-fever as well as other maladies--to-morrow. Then will come
Trinidad, with its Hindoo villages to see. Photos, bought at Demerara
and St. Kitts, predict visions of Indian grace worth daring the
perpendicular sun to see. I am now the only passenger. My last
companion--a fine Northwestern man--goes, I fear, to leave his bones in
the bush. From the interior men are being carried back to the coast to
die, yet the stream pours on to the gold-mines. My miner thinks he can
stand it: he has dug for African gold, under a fiercer sky. He was an
odd fellow. Saw no beauty in these islands. "No, partner--if you want to
see scenery see the Rockies: that's something to look at! Even the sea's
afraid of them mountains,--ran away from them: you can see four thousand
feet up where the sea tried to climb before it got scared!"
Sometimes the apes on board are taught the experiences of life, the
advantages of civilization. Torpedoes are tied to their tails;
fire-crackers surround them with circles of crepitation and flame. Also
they are occasionally paralyzed by unexpected sensations of
electricity;--they have made the acquaintance of a galvanic battery;
they have been induced to do foolish things which resulted in sharp and
unfamiliar pains and burnings. Their lives are astonishments, and
prolonged spasms of terror.
The sea at night is an awful and magnificent sight. It looks
infernal,--Acherontic;--black surges that break into star-spray;--an
abyss full of moving lights that come and go.
Well, I can't write a good letter now;--wait till I get back to
Martinique. I wanted you to _know_ I had not forgotten my promise to
write. You must make a trip down here some day. It is not hotter than
New York except in the sun.
_You can do whatever you wish._ You have force to do it. You have more
brains in your finger-tips than some who have managed to get a big
reputation. The little talk about Grande Isle that night was an absolute
poem,--gave me a sense of the charm of the place such as I felt the
first beautiful morning there. You don't know what you can do, _if you
want to_.
I think I should do something with this novel material, it is so rich in
absurd colour! But I don't feel enthusiastic now. Enthusiasm has been
numbed by a long series of violent sensations and unexpected
experiences. I have artistic indigestion;--going to try to dream it away
at divine, paradisaical Martinique. There I will write you again. My
address will be, care American Consul. But you mustn't write unless you
have plenty of time;--I am only paying my debts, not trying to make you
waste paper answering me.
I believe I am beginning to write absurdities: it is so hot that
rain-clouds form in one's head.
Good-bye, believe the best you can of me.
Your friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, 1887.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--I am settled here for at least a month:--wish I
could settle here forever. I love this quaint, whimsical,
wonderfully-coloured little town,--all its ups and downs, vistas of
azure harbour and overshadowing volcanic hills,--all the stones that
whisper under the myriad naked feet of this fantastic population. It
pleases me to find my affection for it is not merely inspiration: the
place has fascinated more than one practical American,--persuaded them
to abandon ambitions, contests, popular esteem, friends, society,--and
to settle here for the rest of their days, in delightful indolence and
dreamy content.
In my trunk I have something for you: a Coolie girl's bracelet. It will
not look so well on your arm as on hers, because its effect depends on a
background of dark colour; and all this clumsy Indian jewelry is
inartistically wrought. It is indeed made chiefly for economical
reasons. Coolies so carry their wealth;--I saw one Hindoo wife with some
$900 worth of jewelry upon her.
In the little Coolie village near Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I sat, and
looked at rudely painted Indian gods, while waiting for the silversmith
to sit down before his ridiculous little anvil. All the palm-shadows,
intensely black, crawled outside like tarantulas; it was a glowing
day,--blindingly blue: the light of a larger sun seemed to fill the
world,--a white sun,--Sirius!
"Ra!" called out the Coolie smith when I told him I wanted to look at
his jewelry;--and his wife came in. She wore the Hindoo garb without the
long veils: a white robe like a Greek chiton, or rather like a lady's
chemise,--leaving the arms and ankles bare, and confined about the
waist. I thought her very lovely,--slender and delicate,--a perfect
bronze-colour: the gold-flower attached to the nostril did not impair
the symmetry of the face;--extraordinary eyes and teeth. She held out
her pretty round arms for examination: there were about ten silver rings
upon each: the two outer ones being round, the inner eight being flat.
The arm was infinitely prettier than the bracelets;--I selected one
ring, and the smith opened and removed it with an iron instrument and
gave it me. It had a faint musky odour: perhaps that was why the smith
insisted on putting it into an absurdly small furnace, and purifying it
after the Indian manner.
I wanted to buy a pair of baby bracelets;--so they brought in the
baby,--a girl, and therefore (?) having a dress on. The little babies of
the other sex wear nothing but circles of silver on arms and ankles.
Sometimes the custom is extended; for the little wife who carried her
girl baby to the post-office when I was at Demerara, carried it naked
at her hip in the most primitive manner.
This Trinidad baby had absurdly large eyes,--looked supernatural: the
mother's eyes magnified. She held up her little arms and I chose two
rings. Then she talked to me in--Creole patois! It is the commercial
dialect of the poor; and the Hindoos learn it well.
Always truly,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
There are palms here over 200 feet high. There are fish here of all the
colours of marsh-sunset.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
FORT DE FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, July, 1887.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--Imagine yourself turned into marble, all
white,--robed after the fashion of the Directory,--standing forever on a
marble pedestal, under an enormous azure day,--encircled by a ring of
tall palms, graceful as Creole women,--and gazing always, always, over
the summer sea, toward emerald Trois Islets.
That is _Josephine_! I think she looks just like you, "Mamzelle
Josephine,"--or Zefine, if you like.
I want to tell you a little story about her,--just a little anecdote
somebody told me on the street, which I want to develop into a sketch
next week.
It was after the fall of the Second Empire,--after France felt the iron
heel of Germany upon her throat.
Far off in this delicious little Martinique, the Republican rage made
itself felt;--the huge reaction passed over the ocean like a magnetic
current. So it happened, in a little while, that the Martinique
politicians resolved to do that which had already been done in
France,--to obliterate the memories of the Empire.
There was Mamzelle Zefine, _par exemple_!... They put a rope round her
beautiful white neck. They prepared to destroy the statue.
Then Somebody rang the Church-bell--(you ought to see the sleepy little
church: it makes you want to doze the moment you pass into its cool
shadow). A vast crowd gathered in the Savane.
It was a crowd of women,--mostly women who had been slaves,--quadroons,
mulattoesses; the house-servants, the _bonnes_, the nurses and
housekeepers of the old days. (You could form no possible idea of this
coloured Creole element without seeing it: it does not exist in New
Orleans.) They gathered to defend Mamzelle Zefine.
When the Republican officials came with their workmen at sunrise,
Mamzelle Zefine was still gazing toward Trois Islets; she was white as
ever; her pure cold passionate face just as lovely: she seemed totally
indifferent to what was about to happen,--she was dreaming her eternal
plaintive dream.
But she could well afford to feel indifferent! About her, under the
circle of the palms, surged a living sea,--a tide of angry yellow faces,
above which flashed the lightning of cane-knives, axes, _couteaux de
boucher_. "Ah! li vieu!--lâches! cafa'ds! pott'ons! Vos pas cabab
toucher li! Touché li--yon tête fois!--Osé toucher li. Capons
Républicains! Osé toucher li!"
Mamzelle Zefine still gazed plaintively toward Trois Islets. She must
have seemed to that yellow population to live;--for each one she
represented some young mistress, some petted child, some memory of the
old colonial days. And all the love of the slave for the master--all the
strange passionate senseless affection of the servant for the Creole
family--was stirred to storm by the mere idea of the proposed
desecration. The man who should have dared to lay an evil finger upon
Josephine that day would have been torn limb from limb in the public
square. The officials were frightened and foiled: they pledged their
faith that the statue should not be touched.
So they took the ropes away; and they piled flowers at Mamzelle Zefine's
white feet; they garlanded her; they twined the crimson jessamines of
the tropics about her beautiful white throat.
And she is still here,--always in the circle of the palms, always
looking to Trois Islets, always beautiful and sweet as a young Creole
maiden,--dreamy, gracious, loving,--with a smile that is like some
faint, sweet memory of other days.
Always,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
NEW YORK, 1887.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--Thanks for the gracious little letter. I wish I
could see you, and see other friends; but fate forbids. Distances are
too enormous; engagements imperative; preparations for coming journey
made my head whirl. For I return to the tropics, dear Miss
Bisland,--probably forever: I imagine that civilization will behold me
no more, except as a visitor at very long intervals. I would like to
write you sometimes, praying only that my letters be not ever shown unto
newspaper people. You will hear from me soon again. I am off on Friday
afternoon, and have not even the necessary time to do what I ought to do
in the mere matter of exceedingly small purchases, outfits, etc.
Good-bye, with best regards and something a little more, too.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
I have not seen Krehbiel at all,--was out of town when I returned, and
seems to have found no time afterwards.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
NEW YORK, 1887.
Your letter reached me just at a time 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.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, May, 1888.
DEAR GOULD,--One of your letters, I think a P. Cd., many months ago,
caught me in British Guiana, another to-day finds me here. I left N. O.
in June, 1887, and have been travelling since, or at least sojourning in
these tropics. I have been sick, too,--have had some trouble fighting
the influences of climate, trouble in trying to carry out large plans
with absurdly small resources; and have been unable to do my friends
justice. How could you think I could have been offended? It was only the
other day, in a letter to the editor of _Harper's_, that I referred to
one of your delightful colour-theories.
Praise from you I value very highly. As to impress such a mind as yours
means to me a great pride and pleasure. I am delighted "Chita" pleased
you.
I have written a number of sketches on the West Indies,--some of which
may appear in a few months, others later on. It has been a hope of mine
to make a unique book on these strange Hesperides, with their singularly
mixed races; but I don't know whether I shall be able to carry the
project out.
The climate is antagonistic to work. It is a benumbing power, rendering
concentrated thought almost out of the question. I can now understand
why the tropics have produced so little literature.
We are quarantined and isolated for the present by a long epidemic of
small-pox, which among these populations means something as fatal as an
Oriental plague. The whites are exempt. But the disease, although on the
decline, still prevails to an extent rendering it doubtful when I can
get away from here.
I would like much to hear from you when you have time. I am temporarily
settled here, and everything goes well enough now, so that I can write
regularly.
With best affection,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
GRAND ANSE, MARTINIQUE, June, 1888.
DEAR DR. GOULD,--I am writing you from an obscure, pretty West Indian
village, seldom visited by travellers. Tall palms, and a grand roaring
sea, blue as lapis lazuli in spite of its motion.
I was certainly even more pleased to hear from you than you could have
been at the receipt of my letter;--for in addition to the intellectual
and sympathetic pleasure of such a correspondence, the comparative
rarity of friendly missives, enhancing their value, lends them certain
magnetism difficult to describe,--the sensation, perhaps, of that North,
and that Northern vigour of mind which has made the world what it is,
and that pure keen air full of the Unknowable Something which has made
the Northern Thought.
I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases
that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd
to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost
sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of
the intellectual life are all lacking here,--no libraries, no books in
any language;--a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden
long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive
savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be
pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or
to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with
one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for
months.
But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more
daily,--that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her
local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the
great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then,
after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds
in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish
things,--that life is very sweet without them;--and you actually find
yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of
the struggle for life in the North are all madness,--that they wasted
years which might have been delightfully dozed away in land where the
air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods
perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot.
I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me
impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a
cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a
while,--a short while, probably;--but I do not think I will ever settle
there. I am apt to become tired of places,--or at least of the
disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming
more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that
ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend
how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,--the odours, the
colours, the shapes of Shadows, and tint of its sky;--and how small
irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;--yet
perhaps you will not comprehend that one can actually become weary of a
whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited
experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,--an unutterable
weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly
organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the
struggle. One feels this especially in America,--in the nervous centres
of the world's activity. One feels at least, I imagine, in the tropics,
where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for
the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I
clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things
to do:--To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of
Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in
this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;--to keep it
requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few
years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to
live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it
in very short order.
I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went to Demerara
and visited the lesser West Indies in July and August of last
year,--returned to New York after three months with some MS.,--sold
it,--felt very unhappy at the idea of staying in New York, where I had
good offers,--suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics by the
very same steamer that had brought me. I had no commission, resolved to
trust to magazine-work. So far I have just been able to scrape
along;--the climate numbs mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for
won't come. The real--surpassing imagination--whelms the ideal out of
sight and hearing. The world is young here,--not old and wise and grey
as in the North; and one must not seek the Holy Ghost in it. I suspect
that the material furnished by the tropics can only be utilized in a
Northern atmosphere. We will talk about it together; for I will
certainly call on you in Philadelphia some day.
I would not hesitate, if I were you, to begin the _magnum opus_;--the
only time to hesitate would be when it is all complete, before giving to
the printer. Then one may perhaps commune with one's self to advantage
upon the question of what might be gained or lost by waiting for more
knowledge through fresh expansions of science. But the true way to
attempt an enduring work is to begin it as a duty, without considering
one's self in the matter at all, but the subject only,--which you love
more and more the longer you caress it, and find it taking form and
colour and beauty with the patient years.
I am horribly ignorant about scientific matters; but sometimes the
encouragement of a layman makes the success of the prelate.
Now, replying to your question about "Chita." "Chita" was founded on the
fact of a child saved from the Lost Island disaster by some Louisiana
fisher-folk, and brought up by them. Years after a Creole hunter
recognized her, and reported her whereabouts to relatives. These, who
were rich, determined to bring her up as young ladies are brought up in
the South, and had her sent to a convent. But she had lived the free
healthy life of the coast, and could not bear the convent;--she ran away
from it, married a fisherman, and lives somewhere down there now,--the
mother of multitudinous children.
And about my work, I can only tell you this:--I will have two
illustrated articles on a West Indian trip in the _Harper's Monthly_
soon,--within four or five months. These will be followed by brief West
Indian sketches. Other sketches, not suited for the magazine, will go to
form a volume to be published later on. I do not correspond or write for
any newspaper, and I would always let you know in advance where anything
would be published written by me.
You know what the nervous cost of certain imaginative work means; and
this sort of work I do not think I shall be able to do here. One
has no vital energy to spare in such a climate. I cannot read
Spencer here,--gave up the "Biology" (vol. II) in despair. But I
did not miss the wonderful page about the evolution of the
eye--hair--snail-horn--etc., etc.... I want to see anything you write
that I can understand, with my limited knowledge of scientific terms and
facts. And when you write again, tell me what you said of Loti in the
letter I never received. Did you read his "Roman d'un Spahi"? I thought
you would like it. If you do not, let me know why,--because Loti has had
much literary influence upon me, and I want to know his faults as well
as his merits. With love to you,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, August, 1888.
DEAR GOULD,--Many thanks for the _quid_!--the surprising _quid_. I have
been waiting to send you the _quo_, which I do not like so well as one
taken in New Orleans, of which I have no copy within reach. But before I
tell you anything about the _quo_, I ought to scold you for your
startling deception. I pictured you as a much younger man than
myself--although quite conscious of meeting an intelligence much more
virile and penetrating than my own, and with an experience of life
larger: this did not, however, astonish me; for whatever qualities I
have lie only in that one direction which pleased you and won your
friendship,--moreover, I had met several _much_ younger men than myself,
my mental superiors in every respect. But, all of a sudden you come upon
me with such a revelation of your personality as makes me half afraid of
you. I perceive that your _envergure_ is much larger than I imagined:--I
mean, of course, the mental spread-of-wing; and then your advice and
suggestions, while manifesting your ability to teach me much in my own
line, resemble only those proffered by old experienced masters in
literary guidance. It is exactly the advice of Alden, among one or two
others.
Now about the _quo_. I am about five feet three inches high, and weigh
about 137 pounds in good health;--fever has had me down to 126. Nothing
phthisical,--36¾ inches round the chest, stripped. Was born in June
(27th), 1850, in Santa Maura (the antique Leucadia), of a Greek mother.
My father, Dr. Charles Bush Hearn, who spent most of his life in India,
was surgeon-major of the 76th British regiment (now merged in West
Riding Battalion). Do not know anything about my mother, whether alive
or dead;--was last heard of (remarried) in Smyrna, about 1858-9. My
father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the
history of my father's marriage. It is not, however, of the sort to
interest you in a letter. I am very near-sighted, have lost one eye,
which disfigures me considerably; and my near-sightedness always
prevented the gratification of a natural _penchant_ for physical
exercise. I am a good swimmer; that is all.
Your advice about story-writing is capital; I am not so sure about your
suggestion of plot. I cannot believe--in view of the extraordinary
changes (changes involving even the whole osseous structure) wrought in
the offspring of Europeans or foreigners within a single generation by
the tropical climate--that anything of the parental moral character on
the _father's_ side would survive with force sufficient to produce the
psychical phenomena you speak of. In temperate climates these do survive
astonishingly, even through generations; in the tropics, Nature moulds
every new being _at once_ into perfect accord with environment, or else
destroys it. The idea you speak of occurred to me also; it was abandoned
after a careful study of tropical conditions. It could only be used on
an _inverse_ plot,--transporting the tropical child to the North. At
least, I think so, with my present knowledge on the subject,--which
might be vastly improved, no doubt....
About story-writing, dear friend, you ought to know I would like to be
able to do nothing else. But even in these countries, where life is so
cheap, I could not make the pot--or as they call it here, the
_canari_--boil by story-writing until I gain more literary success, and
can obtain high prices. A story takes at least ten or twelve months to
write, that is, a story of the length of "Chita." Suppose it brings only
$500,--half as much as you will soon be able to obtain for a single
operation! It is pretty hard to live even in the tropics on that sum. I
must write sketches too. They do me other good also, involve research I
might otherwise neglect. I have prepared some twelve sketches in all,
which obligated investigation that will prove invaluable for a
forthcoming novelette.
I like your firm, strong, sonorous letter, better than anything of the
sort I ever received. The only thing I did not relish in it was the
suggestion that I should prepare a lecture, or make an appearance before
a private club. I would not do it for anything! I shrink from real life,
however, not at all because I am pessimistic. It is a very beautiful
world:--the ugliness of some humanity only exists as the shadowing that
outlines the view; the nobility of man and the goodness of woman can
only be felt by those who know the possibilities of degradation and
corruption. Philosophically I am simply a follower of Spencer, whose
mind gives me the greatest conception of Divinity I can yet expand to
receive. The faultiness is not with the world, but with myself. I
inherit certain susceptibilities, weaknesses, sensitivenesses, which
render it impossible to adapt myself to the ordinary _milieu_; I have to
make one of my own, wherever I go, and never mingle with that already
made. True, I lose much knowledge, but I escape pains which, in spite of
all your own knowledge, you could not wholly comprehend, for the simple
reason that you _can_ mingle with men. By the way, it is no small
disadvantage in life to be 5 ft. 3 in. high. I remember observing, at a
great gathering of American merchant princes, that the small or
insignificant looking men present might have been counted on the fingers
of one hand. Success in life still largely depends upon the power to
impose respect, the reserve of mere physical force; since the expansion
of everybody's individuality--at the expense of everybody else's
individuality--is still the law of existence.
I am not yet sure what I am going to do. One thing certain is that I am
to go to South or to Central America--for monetary reasons. I may linger
here long enough to finish a novelette. If not able to do so, I will
perhaps be in New York before December. I left it October 2, 1887, after
a stay of only three weeks, to return to the tropics. It was then
impossible to visit Philadelphia. Should I go to the Continent from
here, you will know at least six weeks in advance.
Thanks for the superb paper on Loti. I cannot imagine anything much
finer in the way of literary analysis. But what does James
want?--evolution to leap a thousand years? What he classes as sensual
perceptions must be sensitized and refined supernally,--fully evolved
and built up _before_ the moral ones, of which they are the
physiological foundations, pedestals. Granting the doubt as to the
ultimate nature of Mind, it is still tolerably positive that its
development--so far as man is concerned--follows the development of the
nervous system; and that very sensuousness which at once delights and
scandalizes James, rather seems to me a splendid augury of the higher
sensitiveness to come, in some future age of writers and poets,--the
finer "_sensibility of soul_," whose creative work will caress the
nobler emotions more delicately than Loti's genius ever caressed the
senses of colour and form and odour.
You ask about my idea of Whitman? I have not patience for him,--not as
for Emerson. Enormous _suggestiveness_ in both, rather than clear
utterance. I used to like John Weiss better than Emerson. Then there is
a shagginess, an uncouthness, a Calibanishness about Whitman that
repels. He makes me think of some gigantic dumb being that sees things,
and wants to make others see them, and cannot for want of a finer means
of expression than Nature gives him. But there is manifest the rude
nobility of the man,--the primitive and patriarchal soul-feeling to men
and the world. Whitman lays a Cyclopean foundation on which, I fancy,
some wonderful architect will yet build up some marvellous thing....
Yes, there is nonsense in Swinburne, but he is merely a melodist and
colourist. He enlarges the English tongue,--shows its richness,
unsuspected flexibility, admirable sponge-power of beauty-absorption. He
is not to be despised by the student.
Let me pray you not to make mention of anything written to you thus,
even incidentally, to newspaper folk--or to any literary folk who would
not be _intimate_ friends. There are reasons, more than personal, for
this suggestion, acceptance of which would remove any check on
frankness.
Best love to you, from
LAFCADIO HEARN.
Speaking of Whitman, I must add that my idea of him is not consciously
stable. It has changed within some years. What I like, however, was not
Whitman exactly,--rather the perception of something Whitman feels, and
disappoints by his attempted expression of.
After closing letter I remember you wanted to know about illustrations
in magazine. They are after photos. I am sorry to say incorrect use has
been made of several: the types published as _Sacratra_ were not
_Sacratra_, but in two cases half-breed Coolie,--one seemingly of
Southern India, showing a touch of Malay. There were other errors. It is
horrible not to be able to correct one's _own_ work,--on account of
irregularities in mail involved by quarantine. In the December number
you will see a study of a peculiar class of young girls here. If you
want, yourself, to have some particular photo of some particular thing,
send word, and I will try to get it for you.
I can only work here of mornings. Nobody dreams of eating before noon:
all rise with the sun. After 2 P.M., the heat and weight of the air make
thinking impossible. Your head gets heavy, as if there was lead in it,
and you sleep.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE,
October, 1888.
DEAR FRIEND GOULD,--I have read your delightful letter,--also, the
delightful essays of James you so kindly sent me. I suspect James has
not his equal as a literary chemist: the analyses of his French
contemporary, Lemaître, are far less qualitative. You have made me know
him as a critic;--I had only known him as a novelist. My work has been
poor; it has been condensed and recondensed for the magazine till all
originality has been taken out of it; finally I never had a chance to
revise it in proof. I believe I have temporarily lost all creative
power: it will come back to me, perhaps, when I inhale some Northern
ozone.
I would like to call your attention to the article by Loti in
_Fortnightly Review_--"Un Rêve," a delicious little psychological
phenomenon. Have you seen "Madame Chrysanthemum"--wonderfully
illustrated!
Are you perfectly, positively sure there is really a sharp distinction
between moral and physical sensibilities? I doubt it. I suspect what we
term the finer moral susceptibilities signify merely a more complex and
perfect evolution of purely physical sensitiveness. The established
distinction simply seems to me that "moral" feelings are those into
which the sexual instinct does not visibly enter, or those in which some
form of desire, some form of egotism, does not predominate at the cost
of justice to others. There is a queer vagueness about all definitions
of the moral sense. When one's physical sensibilities are fully
developed and properly balanced, I do not think wickedness to others
possible. The cruel and the selfish are capable of doing what is called
wrong, because they are ignorant of the suffering inflicted. Thorough
consciousness of the result of acting forms morality, if morality is
self-restraint, self-sacrifice, incapacity to injure unnecessarily;--one
who understands pain does not give it. Of course, I am not a believer in
free will. I do not believe in the individual soul,--though in the
manifestations of a universal human, or divine, soul, I am inclined to
believe, or to have that doubt which almost admits of belief. What
offends in certain writings, I suppose, is the feeling that the writer's
faculties are not perfectly balanced,--that certain senses are so much
more developed than others that one can suspect him of yielding to
cruelties of egotism. Perhaps I may say that I would call moral
feelings, as distinguished from those termed physical, the sensitiveness
of perception of suffering in others,--of the consequences of acts. But
can those be thoroughly developed before those which conduce to
self-preservation? I imagine the reverse to be the case. By the
super-refinement of the earlier sensations comes the capacity for the
"higher sentiments." It is true that moral standards are very old, but
those existing are also very defective. Evolutionally, egotism must
precede altruism;--altruism itself being only a sort of double reflex
action of egotism.--All this is very badly written; but you can catch
the idea I am trying to express.
When you think of tropical Nature as cruel and splendid, like a leopard,
I fancy the Orient, which is tropical largely, dominates the idea.
Humanity has a great beauty in these tropics, a great charm,--that of
childishness, and the goodness of childishness. As for the mysterious
Nature, which is the soul of the land, it was understood by the ancient
Mexicans, whose goddess of flowers, Coatlicue, was robed in a robe of
serpents interwoven. She is rich in death as in life, this Nature, and
lavish of both. I would love her; but I fear she is an enemy of the
mind,--a hater of mental effort.
No, indeed, I did not laugh at your experiences. I have had nearly as
multiform; but mine were less successful,--I was less fitted for them. I
have not your advantages, nor capacities. I never learned German. It is
only in America such careers are possible. I wish I could have finished
like you, as a physician; for I hold, that with the modern development
of medicine as an enormous interbranching system of science and
philosophy, the physician is the only perfect man, mentally. Like those
old Arabian physicians who affected to treat the soul, the modern knows
the mind, the reason of actions, the source of impulses,--which must
make him the most generous of men to the faults of others.
I don't like your plot for a medical novel at all. It involves ugliness.
I believe in Théophile Gautier's idea of art, study only the
beautiful;--create only ideals, therefore. You are not a realist, I am
sure. Then your plot is too thin. It has not the beauty nor depth of
that simple narrative about a famous painter, or writer,--I forget
which,--whose imagination rendered it impossible for him to complete his
medical studies. Shapes impressed themselves upon his brain as on the
brain of an artist: vividly to painfulness. He was in love, engaged to
be married; under the peach flesh and behind the velvet gaze, he always
saw the outlined skull, the empty darkness of void orbits. He had to
abandon medicine for art. A very powerful short sketch might be made of
this _fact_.
I believe in a medical novel,--a wonderful medical novel. We must chat
about it. Why not use a fantastic element,--anticipate discoveries hoped
for,--anticipate them so powerfully as to make the reader believe you
are enunciating realities?
Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it.
It would have to be sexual. Never could you find in the tropics that
magnificent type of womanhood, which, in the New England girl, makes one
afraid even to think about sex, while absolutely adoring the
personality. Perfect natures inspire the love that is a fear. I don't
think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love
that is half a compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy,
delusive--pregnant with future pains innumerable.
I don't know why you hold the work of Spencer, etc., more colourless
than those of the other philosophers and scientists whom you have
studied--all except beastly Hegel: there is an awful poetry to me in the
revelation of which these men are the mouthpieces, as much vaster than
the old thoughts as the foam of suns in the _via lactea_ is vaster than
the spume of a wave on the sea-beach. Wallace I know only as a traveller
and naturalist; is it the same Wallace? I am very fond of him too: he is
very human, fraternal: he is not like God the Father as Spencer is. I
suppose what we need is God the Holy Ghost. He is not yet come.
Flower, who wrote that interesting little book "Fashion in Deformity"
and many other excellent things, could find some good texts here. I am
convinced now that most of our fashions are deformities; that grace is
savage, or must be savage in order to be perfect; that man was never
made to wear shoes; that in order to comprehend antiquity, the secret of
Greek art, one must know the tropics a little (so much has fashion
invaded the rest of the world), and that the question of more or less
liberty in the sex relation is like the tariff question--one of
localities and conditions, scarcely to be brought under a general rule.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE,
February, 1889.
DEAR GOULD,--A letter to you has been lying on my desk for months
unfinished,--I can only just gum the envelope and let it go as it is. I
am obliged at intervals--thank Goodness, only at very long ones--to let
all correspondence, even the most important, wait a little or risk the
results of interrupting a work which exacts all one's thinking time
during waking hours. This has been partly my case,--having just
completed a novelette; but I have also had a good deal of trouble about
other matters that left me no chance to do anything until now. I am free
again,--I hope for a good long time.
Meanwhile I received your pamphlets, and read every one with more
pleasure than you could readily believe a non-scientific man could feel
in them. Of course, those which interested me most were:
1. That on the Homing Instinct (a much better word than the French
_orientation_). 2. That on the electric light. My first experience with
the light was painful; then I learned to like it (the white, not the
yellow) very much and found gaslight intensely disagreeable afterward.
By the way, do you correspond with Romanes, who solicits correspondence
on the subject of animals? You know him, of course, the author of
"Animal Intelligence" and "Mental Evolution in Animals." A man like that
ought to be delighted with such a splendid and powerful suggestion as
that of your pamphlet. I hope you are not too patriotic to think you
cannot do better with a scientific suggestion abroad than at home. There
are certain things that seem to me too worthy to remain buried in the
archives of a medical society,--which ought to reach a larger scientific
circle through a more eclectic medium, such as that of the superb
foreign reviews, devoted to what used to be called natural history, but
for which the term has long ago become too small. Still I am sure you
must have heard from your paper on the homing instinct if the
publication in which it appeared reached the quarters it ought to have
reached.
I don't know what to tell you about myself. Since October last I have
been buried in my room--facing, happily, a semi-circle of Mornes curving
away into a sea like lapis lazuli--and have neither heard nor seen
anything else. We had an epidemic of yellow fever which carried away
many Europeans and strangers; but it is over, and the weather is
delightful, if you can call weather delightful which keeps you drenched
in perspiration from morning to night, and forces you to lie down and
sleep in the afternoon if you dare attempt to write or read. The
difficulty of work in such a climate only those who have had the
experience can understand. I think my case is an experiment; almost a
phenomenon,--and I am very curious to know the result by the verdict
upon my work. I cannot judge it myself here. What at sundown seems good
in the morning appears damnably bad; and I was obliged to give every
page a test of three or four days' waiting. My novelette made itself
out of an incident related to me about a case of heroism during a great
negro revolt.
There is no question but that I shall be in New York this summer, for a
while. It is imperative. I have to oversee work before it can be
published;--that which already appeared was in terribly bad shape on
account of my not having seen the proofs. Then I may be getting out a
little book.
Did you see the incident in regard to the admission of a remarkable
young lady doctor into the profession by the faculty of Paris,--the
remarks of Charcot and others? I thought of your medical novel. There
were some remarks very suggestive made. The thesis of the candidate was
the position and duty of woman as a physician. You know what those
French are, and what peculiar ways they have of looking at the question
of women as physicians;--the Paris papers made all kinds of
_observations scabreuses_; but the dignity of the girl carried her
splendidly through the ordeal--an ordeal to which Americans would never
put a female student.
I have a curious compilation,--"Etudes pathologiques et historiques sur
l'origine et la propagation de la Fièvre Jaune" (1886),--perhaps you
know it already,--by Dr. Cornilliac of Martinique. If you do not know it
I will send it you from New York. It contains a great deal of valuable
matter regarding the climate of the West Indies, and formative
influences of that climate on races and temperament. Martinique has had
several physicians of colonial celebrity,--how great I cannot estimate,
being ignorant of their comparative value; but some of them have a
decided charm as writers and historians. Such was Rufz de Lavison,
author of a delightful history of the colony, and a work upon the
_trigonocephalus_, which would not bear equal praise, I fancy. If you
want any information about medical matters in Martinique, I will hunt it
up for you.
I hope to see you and have a great chat with you. But the heat is great,
and there is an accumulation of letters to answer, and you will forgive
me for saying for the moment good-bye.
Your sincere friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE,
April, 1889.
DEAR GOULD,--I read your pamphlets with intense pleasure: that on the
effect of reflex neurosis, of course, impressed me only as a curious
research; but your paper on dreams, full of truth and suggestive beauty,
had much more than a scientific interest for me. There is a world of
poetical ideas and romantic psychology evoked by its perusal. I wonder
only that you did not dwell more upon the softness, sweetness,
impalpable goodness of this dream-world in which everything--even what
we usually think wrong--seems to be right. Doubtless all man's dreams of
paradise, of a golden past age, or a perfect future, were born of the
thin light vanishing sensations of dream. The work of Gautier cited by
you--"Avatar"--was my first translation from the French. I never could
find a publisher for it, however, and threw the MS. away at last in
disgust. It is certainly a wonderful story; but the self-styled
Anglo-Saxon has so much damnable prudery that even this innocent
phantasy seems to shock his sense of the "proper."
You will be pleased to hear my novelette has been a success with the
publishers. It cost me terrible work in this continual heat, small as it
is; and I feel so mentally blank that I must get back to the States for
a while to seek some vitality, brighten whatever blood I have got left
after two years of tropical air.
If you could find me in Philadelphia a very quiet room where I could
write without noise for a few months, I would try my luck there. New
York is stupefying; I know too many people there; and I want to be very
quiet,--only to see a friend or two now and then, when I am in good trim
for a chat. I shall return to the West Indies in the winter.
Address me if you have time to write c/o H. M. Alden, Edr. _Harper's
Magazine_;--for I shall have left Martinique, doubtless, by the time
this reaches you.
Faithfully,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO JOSEPH TUNISON
NEW YORK, 1889.
DEAR JOE,--By the time this reaches you I shall have disappeared.
The moment I get into all this beastly machinery called "New York," I
get caught in some belt and whirled around madly in all directions until
I have no sense left. This city drives me crazy, or, if you prefer,
crazier; and I have no peace of mind or rest of body till I get out of
it. Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything
seems to be mathematics and geometry and enigmatics and riddles and
confusion worse confounded: architecture and mechanics run mad. One has
to live by intuition and move by steam. I think an earthquake might
produce some improvement. The so-called improvements in civilization
have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see, hear, or find
anything out. You are improving yourselves out of the natural world. I
want to get back among the monkeys and the parrots, under a violet sky
among green peaks and an eternally lilac and lukewarm sea,--where
clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an exertion,--where
everybody sleeps 14 hours out of the 24. This is frightful, nightmarish,
devilish! Civilization is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery! Surely a
palm 200 feet high is a finer thing in the natural order than seventy
times seven New Yorks. I came in by one door as you went out at the
other. Now there are cubic miles of cut granite and iron fury between
us. I shall at once find a hackman to take me away. I am sorry not to
see you--but since you live in hell what can I do? I will try to find
you again this summer.
Best affection,
L. H.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--A week ago in New York I was asking a friend where
you were, but could then obtain no satisfactory information without
taking steps I had no time to attempt. I was really glad to get out of
the frightful whirl and roar of modern improvements as soon as possible,
but regretted not seeing you, even while assured of being able to do so
before long.
It is true I have been silent with my friends: I did not write seven
letters in seventeen months,--not even business letters. It was very
difficult to write anything in the continuous enervating heat; and I had
to struggle with difficulties of the most unlooked for sort,
incessantly,--until I found correspondence become almost impossible. But
I thought of you very often; and wondered if you were still in that
terrible metropolis. I saw in Max O'Rell's book some lines about a
charming young lady and thought it must have been you.... I returned on
the 8th from Martinique.
Dr. Matas sent me your pretty eulogy of "Chita"--which I often re-read
afterward, and which gave me encouragement when I began to doubt whether
I could do anything else.... I don't think I shall write another story
in the same manner,--feel I have changed very much in my way of looking
at things and of writing. "Chita" will soon be sent to you in book form
as a souvenir of Grande Isle: it is not as short a story as it looked in
the serried type of _Harper's_--will make a volume of 225 pp. I will
have something else to send you, however, that will interest you more as
to novelty,--a volume of tropical sketches.
I wonder whether you could ever throw upon paper the thoughts you
uttered to me that evening I visited you nearly two years ago,--when you
said _why_ you liked Grande Isle. In your few phrases you said much that
I had been trying to express and could not,--at least it so seemed to
me.... I have seen a great many strange beaches since; but nothing like
the morning charm of Grande Isle ever revealed itself. I wonder if I
were to see it now, whether I should feel the same pleasure....
Thanks for those verses!--there is a large, strong, strange beauty in
them. There seems, you know, to be just now a straining-up of eyes to
look for some singer able to prophesy,--to chant even one hymn of that
cosmic faith that is stealing upon the world.
Affectionately your friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--Oh! what a stiff epistle, with a little sharp
pointing of reproach twisting about in the tail of every letter! Really
you must never, never feel vexed at anything I write:--I wrote you just
as I wrote to Mr. Stedman about the same matter. I feel the man
sometimes is much less than the work: my work, however weak, is so much
better than myself, that the less said about me the better,--then there
are so many things you do not know. As for _you_ not liking
personalities, that is a very different thing! Your own personality has
charm enough to render the truth very palatable. But I am sure, now,
from your letter anything you say will be nice,--though I think it would
have been better not to have said it. Does a portrait of an ugly man
make one desirous to read his book? I could not get out of the Harper
plan for an article on Southern writers, without hurting myself
otherwise; but the candid truth is that I felt like yelling when I saw
the thing--howling and screeching! Indeed I think that my belief in the
invisible personality of a man has been largely forced by my thorough
disgust with the visible personality. Schopenhauer says a beautiful
thing about the former,--that the "I" is the dark point in
consciousness,--just as the point of the retina where the sight-nerve
enters is blind, and as the brain itself is without sensation, and the
eye sees all but itself. I am not anxious to see my soul; but the fact
of inability to see it encourages me to believe it is better than the
thing called L. H.
I don't know that I wrote anything clever enough to be worth your using,
but it is a pleasure you should think so. I can only suggest that the
adoption of my poor notions would tend to make me selfish about such as
I might think really good ones--I would keep them out of my letters,
until they could get into print!?!
_Sub rosa_, now!... My Martinique novelette comes out--the first
part--in January. I think you will like it better than "Chita:" it is
more mature and more exotic by far. It will run through two numbers.
They have made some illustrations which I have not seen, and am
therefore afraid of. Unless an illustration either reflects precisely or
surpasses the writer's imagination, it hurts rather than helps. By the
way, have you ever met H.F. Farny? Farny is an Alsatian, a fine man, and
a superb sketcher--though lazy as a serpent. But if you ever want
imaginative drawing of a certain class, he is one to do it.
Please don't ask me when I'm going to New York. I really can't find out.
I wish I could. I ought to be there on the 15th. But I am peculiarly
situated, tied up by a business-muddle,--tangled by necessities of
waiting for information,--tormented, befuddled, anxious beyond
expression about an undecided plan,--shivering with cold, and longing
for the tropics. All my life I have suffered with cold--all kinds of
cold--psychical and physical;--I hate cold!!!!--I _never_ can resign
myself to live in it!--I can't even think in it, and I would not be
afraid of that Warm Place where sinners are supposed to go! Perhaps the
G.A. will sentence me to everlasting sojourn in an iceberg when I have
ceased to sin.
Very faithfully, and to some extent apologetically.
For you I do remain always as nice as I can be.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--I can't say definitely when I shall be in New York,
to have the delightful pleasure of a chat with you--something I have
been looking forward to for fully a year; but I will write to tell you a
few days in advance. I am drifting about with the forces of
circumstance--following directions of least resistance. Just now I have
a large mass (at least it looks very big to me) of MS. to amend and
emend and arrange into a tropical book: you will like some things in it.
When this job is finished, in a couple of weeks, it is probable I will
set to work on a short sketch or story, for which I have the material
partly arranged; and then I will go to New York. It is so quiet in this
beautiful great city, and my present environment is so pleasant, that I
am sure of doing better work here than I could in that frightful cyclone
of electricity and machinery called New York....
I am afraid you were right about the tropics, and the fascination of
climate. It is still upon me, and I shall find it very difficult to
conquer the temptation to return to the French colonies: the main fact
which helps me is the conviction that I cannot work there,--one's memory
and will blurs and fails in the incessant heat and sleepy air; and for
three months before leaving I could not write a line.... My friends
advise me to try the Orient next time; and I think I shall.
I have a novelette in the _Magazine_ pigeon-holes,--you will like it;
but I don't know when it is going to come out.
It is not a little pleasure to know that my admiration of your verses
can be an encouragement;--you have quite forgiven my ancient effort to
_amend_ a stanza by spoiling it!... I think your present position will
leave you time--after a while--for all you love to do, and can do so
uniquely. Magazine editing is so largely a question of method and
system--so far as I can learn--that I fancy you will eventually find it
possible to claim a few hours every day for yourself;--and such
systematic work as you must take hold of, will not, like journalistic
routine, deaden aspiration. I hope you will have a greater success with
the new monthly than you yourself expect, and I am sure you will if you
have fair chances at all.--But I must wait for the opportunity to see
you--because what one writes (at least what I myself write) on such
matters sounds so fictitious and flat,--though you know it comes from
your sincere friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--It is true that I am only a small Voice;--but the
Voice has been uninterruptedly in the City of Doctors and Quakers, with
the exception of a much regretted interim passed in looking at that
monstrosity,--aptly described by C. D. Warner as "having been cut out
with a scroll-saw,"--Atlantic City.... (May I never, never behold
anything resembling it again!) I fear you must have written the address
wrong--so I send you the right one. It will always do: no matter where I
be. The Voice will call at 475 Fourth Avenue as soon as it can. It is
not its fault that it has not so done already. Everything to be written
must be finished, if possible, by the 15th prox.,--so that I can get
some place where the air is blue before cold weather. I will not be able
to run away from the country before Christmas anyhow.
I trust you are very, very well,--and as--everything--nice as anybody
could wish, and with best regards, remain always,
Your very true and positive friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P.S. Now I want to see those letters which came back from the Dead
Letter Office. Is it really so?
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--I know I am a horrid _ignis fatuus_; but the proofs
of "Chita" are only half-read, and I have no time to get away till it is
all done. Then I am working on a sketch,--then there will be more
proof-reading to do on the other book. But I will certainly get away in
a few weeks more, and will have ever so many things to tell you.
I have never seen the _Cosmopolitan_ in its new dress, and I do not know
what has been going on anywhere....
Philadelphia is a city very peculiar--isolated by custom antique, but
having a good solid social morality, and much peace. It has its own dry
drab newspapers, which are not like any other newspapers in the world,
and contain nothing not immediately concerning Philadelphia.
Consequently no echo from New York enters here--nor any from anywhere
else: there are no New York papers sold to speak of. The Quaker City
does not want them--thinks them in bad taste, accepts only the magazines
and weeklies. But it's the best old city in the whole world all the
same.
Faithfully,
L. HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
MY DEAR MISS BISLAND,--I don't know whether you saw a little gem of
Loti's in the _Fortnightly_; I cut it out and send it,--also an attempt
at translation which proves the wisdom of the English magazine editor in
printing it in French,--and a comment of mine. I don't think you are
likely to wish to print such a thing as the translation; but if you
should, don't use it without sending me a proof, because it is full of
errors.
While in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, I found it--originally contributed,
in French, to the _Fortnightly_ for August, 1888--copied into a French
paper. The impression made by reading it startled me for reasons
independent of the exquisite weirdness of the thought. There was the
great orange sunset of the tropics before me, over a lilac
sea,--bronzing the green of the mango, and tamarind-trees, and the
broad, satiny leaves of _bananier_ and _balisier_. The interior
described in the vision was not of modern Saint-Pierre; but I knew an
old interior in Fort de France, whose present quaint condition repeated
precisely the background of the dream. A hundred years ago there were
but two places on the sunset-side of Martinique which could have
presented the spectacle of the little low streets described,--Fort de
France and Saint-Pierre. The high mountains cut off the sunset glow at
an early hour on the eastern side of the island. It seemed to me a
strange coincidence that in _Les Colonies_, a local paper, I had just
read also, that some old cemetery of Fort de France was about to be
turned into a playground for children.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
DEAR MISS BISLAND,--Verily shirîn, shirîntar, and shirîntarin art
thou,--and Saadi in the Garden of the Taj likewise,--and also the letter
which I have just received.
Emotionally the book is surely Arnold's strongest: it has that intensity
of sweetness which touches the sphere of pain. One need not seek in the
Bostan or Gulistan for the essence of that volume: the Oriental thought
has been transfigured in its reflection from a nineteenth century mind.
There has been in one of Edwin Arnold's books some suggestion of a
future religion of human goodness and human brotherhood, through
recognition of soul-unity,--but in none, I think, so strangely as in
this. And then, what horror to read the very coarse interview published
recently in a daily paper: the brutal repetition of a man's words
uttered under constraint, about the most sacred of sentiments!...
No; I won't go to New York till you come back. I trust you will not
overwork yourself: when we see (I mean "hear") each other, we can talk
over all known devices for lightening literary duties. I am acquainted
with some; and I would not have you fall sick for anything--unless you
were to do me something "awfully mean:" then I'm afraid I would not be
so sorry as I ought to be.
I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow,--but
not very long. By the way, I have an idea which may be wrong, but seems
to me worth uttering. The prose fiction which lives through the
centuries in the short story: like the old Greek romances--narratives
like "Manon Lescaut;" "Paul et Virginie;" the "Candide" of Voltaire; the
"Vicar of Wakefield;" "Undine," etc., outlive all the ampler labour of
their authors. It seems to me that with this century the great novel
will pass out of fashion: three-quarters of what is written is
unnecessary,--is involved simply by obedience to effete formulas and
standards. As a consequence we do not read as we used to. We read only
the essential, skipping all else. The book that compels perusal of every
line and word is the book of power. Create a story of which no reader
can skip a single paragraph, and one has the secret of force,--if not of
durability. My own hope is to do something in accordance with this idea:
no descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanations--nothing but the
feeling itself at highest intensity. I may fail utterly; but I think I
have divined a truth which will yet be recognized and pursued by
stronger minds than mine. The less material, the more force;--the
subtler the power the greater, as water than land, as wind than water,
as mind than wind. I would like to say something about light, heat,
electricity, rates of ether-vibration;--but the notion will work itself
out in your own beautiful mind without any clumsy attempts of mine to
illustrate.
--About the translation,--do as you please,--but don't please put it in
a great big daily, next to the account of a prize-fight or a
murder,--and please, if you do anything with it, see, _above all things
earthly_, that I get proofs. But I would just as soon you would keep it.
I made it for you, and am glad you had not seen the original previously.
I thought the _Cosmo._ was a sort of literary weekly. It is a beautiful
little magazine,--full of surprises; and I trust it is going to win a
great success.
Good-bye;--your Voice wishes you a very happy pleasure-trip, in which
you will feel all sorts of new feelings, and dream all manner of new
dreams.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELIZABETH BISLAND
PHILADELPHIA, 1889.
This morning I dropped you a little note; but this afternoon, reading
your book-chat in the _Cosmo._ I find I must write you something more
impersonal.
--You know, perhaps, that Spencer's thought about education--the
paramount necessity of educating the Will through the Emotion--has
received, consciously or unconsciously, more attention in Italy than
elsewhere. The Emotions are not, as a rule, educated at all outside of
the home-circle. The great public schools of all countries have a system
which either ignores the emotions, or leaves them unprotected;--while
all sectarian teaching warps and withers them in the direction, at
least, of their natural growth. You know all this, I suppose, better
than I. But perhaps you do not know the "Cuore" of Edmondo de Amicis
(Thos. Y. Crowell & Co.), which has passed through 39 Italian editions.
And if you do not know it, I pray you to read it without skipping a
single phrase. It is as full of heart-sweetness as attar-of-roses is
full of flower-ghosts; and it seems a revelation of what emotional
education might accomplish.
I read Brownell's book at your suggestion. It contains, I think, the
best teaching about _how_ to study French character; but I could not
accept many of its inferences,--especially in regard to art and
morality,--without reluctance. There is a sense of something wanting in
the book--something lucid and spiritual (is it Conviction?) that makes
it heavy. How luminous and psychically electric is Lowell's book
compared with it. And how much nobler a soul must be the dreamer of
Chosön!
--I shall never write "Miss Bisland" again, except upon an envelope. It
is a formality,--and you are you: you are not a formality,--but a
somewhat. And I am only
"_I._"
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
DEAR GOULD,--Verily there is no strength nor power but from God,--the
High, the Great! I have thy letter, O thou of enormous working capacity,
and I admire and wonder, but am in no wise sorry for thee, seeing thou
doest that which thou art able to do, and findest pleasure therein and
excellence and dignity and power,--and that if thou wert doing it not
thou wouldst surely be doing something else;--for God (whose name be
exalted!) hath numbered thee among those who find felicity in exceeding
activity. Thou art indeed forty-one years old, by reckoning of time; but
as thou art of the Giants this reckoning hath no signification for thee.
Verily thou art but twenty-five years old, and thou shalt never know
age until a hundred winters shall have passed over thee. And all things
which thou dost desire shall be accorded unto thee by Him who, like
thyself, reposeth never, and whose blessed name be forever exalted! Also
unto thee shall the patients come, as an army for multitude, so that thy
bell shall make but one ringing through all thy days continuously, and
that thy neighbours shall be oppressed by reason of the concourse in the
street about thy dwelling.
But as for me, concerning whom thou makest inquiry, trouble not thyself
about thy servant, whose trust and power are in God--the High, the
Great! That which shall be shall be, and that which hath been shall not
be again:--for the moment, indeed, I am concerned only to know why the
flame of my lamp goeth _upward_, and all flame likewise,--unless it be
for the purpose of praising God (whose name be exalted by all living
creatures!). For thou saidst unto me, being a Kafeer, that Flame is a
vibration only; but thou hast not been able to tell me the mystery of
the pointing of fire and the upreaching of it to the feet of God, the
Compassionate, the Merciful.
Here it raineth always, and this Soul of me is slowly evaporating,
despite the perusal of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who spake of souls.
Meseems that each time I behold the eyes of her concerning whom I spake
to thee, something of that soul is drawn out unto her, and devoured
perhaps for sustenance of that Jinneyah--which is her own soul. So that
mine hath become thin as the inner shadow wrought by a strong double
light upon the ground; and I shall become even as a vegetable
presently--having knowledge of nothing save the witchery of God in the
eyes of women. The memory of Schopenhauer hath passed,--and with its
passing I find my only salvation in a return to the study of the Oceanic
Majesty and Power and Greatness and Holiness and Omniscience of the mind
of Herbert Spencer.
Be thou ever blessed and loved by the sons of men, even as by
HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
GOULD,--You must have skipped, bad boy!--for the girl is _not_ "all face
and foot"! You missed the finely detailed account of her body in
William's diary,--and the just observation of a trait characteristic of
the race in its purity; the great length of the lower limb,--fine
greyhounds, fine thoroughbred horses, and fine men and women have all
this characteristic, like the conventional figures of antique gem-work.
The gipsy-girl is possible: I have seen charming ones. You must read
Borrow's "Gipsies" (the unabbreviated edition in two volumes),--also his
"Bible in Spain," and "Lavengro,"--a Gipsy novel. Simpson's "Gipsies" is
also worth looking at.... But if you won't believe in the bird of
passage, take Carmen and believe in her--there, at least, you will not
doubt: all will prove in accordance with possible sin and sorrow. Why do
you want the Bird's body to be better known--since nobody ever knew it
any better than you know it; (or would know if you had read all)--could
not have except by making to operate, like the Vicar of Azey-le-Rideau,
all its "hinges and mesial partitions," even to disjuncture. What a
singular fact in the history of torture, that the inquisitor was trained
to believe the beautiful body he was breaking and rending and burning
was _never beautiful_--that its grace and symmetry were illusions, the
witchcraft of the dear old compassionate Devil striving to save his
victim by the mirage of fleshly attractiveness! Only through this belief
could certain monstrosities have been possible. It was always Saint
Anthony's temptation!
I have a book for you--an astounding book,--a godlike book. But I want
you to promise to read every single word of it. Every word is dynamic.
It is the finest book on the East ever written; and though very small
contains more than all my library of Oriental books. And an American (?)
wrote it! It is called "The Soul of the Far East." It will astound you
like Schopenhauer, the same profundity and lucidity. Love to you,
HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
DEAR GOULD,--I blacked--that is, I had my boots blacked yesterday,--just
for the same reason that we do things after people are dead (which we
would not have done for them while they lived and asked), with a
ghostly idea of pleasing them. If you had been here I might not have
had them blacked, but as you were gone, I did it for the Shadow of
you. And I gave the boy 20 cents,--because of the feeling that he
might never have such a chance again. That boy runs after me now
everywhere,--but--he is mistaken! I am no longer the same! I have
satisfied my conscience, and enjoy Nirvana.
This morning when I got up I thought the streets looked queer. It seemed
as if they were lighted by the afternoon in some way or other, instead
of the morning. I went to the P. O. with "The Soul of the Far East." How
silent the streets for a Friday morning! The population seemed all to
have ebbed away somewhere as if to look at something. The post-office
was silent as a pyramid inside. I went to the book-store, and found it
closed,--and for the first time realized that it was Sunday. Then I
understood why the streets looked like afternoon; and the sunshine had a
tinge as of evening in a cemetery. Confound Sunday!
Talking with Jakey last night about Nature, I heard him express the
opinion that his capacity of scientific realization of the _causes_ of
things was enough to account for the absence in him of any feeling of
awe or reverence in the presence of mountain scenery. It occurred to me
therewith that the characteristic of indifference to poetry might be
almost common to mathematicians. The man who wrote "The Soul of the Far
East" and "Chosön" is nevertheless an accomplished mathematician. But
you will notice that his divine poetry touches only that which no
scientific knowledge can explain,--that which no mathematics can
solve,--that which must remain mysterious throughout all conceivable
span of time,--the fluttering of the Human Soul in its chrysalis, which
it at once hates and loves, and hates because it loves, and strives to
burst through, and still fears unspeakably to break,--though dimly
conscious of the infinite Ghostly Peace beyond.
HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
DEAR GOULD,--I feel like a white granular mass of amorphous crystals--my
formula appears to be isomeric with Spasmotoxin. My aurochloride
precipitates into beautiful prismatic needles. My Platinochloride
develops octohedron crystals,--with a fine blue fluorescence. My
physiological action is not indifferent. One millionth of a grain
injected under the skin of a frog produced instantaneous death
accompanied by an orange blossom odour. The heart stopped in systole. A
base--L_3 H_9 NG_4--offers analogous reaction to phosmotinigstic
acid. Yours with best regards,
PHOSMOLYODIC LAFCADIO HEARN.
GOULD,--"Concerning zombis, tell me all about them."
HEARN,--"In order to relate you that which you desire, it will be
necessary first to explain the difference in the idea of the
supernatural as existing in the savage and in the civilized mind. Now,
I remember a very strange thing...."
GOULD,--"I'll be back in a minute." (_Strides across the street._)
Violent agitation in the peripheral centres of Hearn, together with
considerable acute anguish, owing to disintegration of cerebral tissue
consequent upon the sudden arrest of nerve-force in discharge. (See
Grant Allen on cause of pain, "Physiological Æsthetics.")
Gould, suddenly reappearing:--"Go on with that old story, now."
(Resurrection of cerebral agitation in the ganglionic centres and
intercorrelate cerebral fibres of Hearn. After desperate and painful
research, the broken threads of memories and impulses are found again,
and peripherally conjointed, and the wounded narrative proceeds, limping
grievously.)
HEARN,--"As I was observing, I recollect one very curious instance of
emotional and fantastic--"
GOULD,--"Yes, I'll be out in a moment--" (_Disappears through a door._)
--Brutal confusion established in the visual, auditory, gustatory, and
olfactory ganglia of Hearn;--general quivering and strain of all the
mnemonic current lines, and then a sense of inquisitorial torture going
on in various brain-chambers, where the vital forces, suddenly arrested,
flow back in a deluge and set all ideas afloat in drowning agony. Slow
recovery as from concussion of the cerebellum.
ENTER GOULD,--"Now proceed with that story of yours."
HEARN,--pacifying the fury of the ganglionic centres with the most
extreme possible difficulty, timidly observes,--
"But you don't care to hear it?"
GOULD,--moving with inconceivable rapidity, dynamically overcharged,--
"Of course, I do: I'm just dying to hear it."
Hearn, running after him, skipping preliminaries in the anguish of "hope
deferred which maketh the heart sick,"--
"Well, it was in the Rue du Bois Morier,--one of the steepest and
strangest streets in the world, full of fantastic gables, and the
shadows of--"
GOULD,--"Yes, I'll be out in a minute." (_Vanishes through a shop
entrance._)
(Inexpressible chaos and bewilderment of impulses afferent and
efferent,--electrical collisions in the ganglia,--unspeakable combustion
of tissue in the intercorrelating fibres,--paralysis of conflicting
emotions,--unutterable anguish: coma followed by acute mania in the
person of Hearn.)
GOULD,--emerging, "Well, go on with that old yarn...."
But Hearn is being already conveyed by two large Philadelphia Policemen
to the Penn. Lunatic Asylum for Uncurables.
Astonishment of Gould.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
GOULD,--Just after I wrote you last night, something began to whiffle
quite soundlessly round my head: I saw only a shadow, and I turned down
the gas,--remembering that he who extinguisheth his light so that
insects may not perish therein, shall, according to the book of Laotse,
obtain longer life and remission of sins. Then it struck me with its
wings so heavily that I knew it was a bat,--for no bird could fly so
silently; and I turned up the gas again,--full. There it was!--very
large,--circling round and round the ceiling so swiftly that I felt
dizzy trying to turn to keep it in sight,--and as noiselessly as its own
shadow above it. I could not tell which was the shadow and which the
life,--until both came together at last upon a ledge, and made a little
peak-shouldered devilish thing with strangely twisted ears.
All at once I remembered an experience in Martinique one summer evening.
We were at Grand Anse,--friend Arnoux and I,--supping in a little room
opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of
the sea; and the great Voice thundered so we could scarcely hear
ourselves speak; and the candle in the verrine fluttered like something
afraid. Then right over my head a bat began to circle, with never a
sound. Arnoux exclaimed: "_Mais, mon cher, regarde cette sacrée
bête--ah--c'est drôle!_" By the look of his face I knew _drôle_ meant
"weird." He struck it down with his napkin and it disappeared; but a
moment later came back again, and flew round as before. Again he hit it
and drove it away; but it always came flitting back. Then we all
laughed;--and Pierre, the host, tickling my ear with his beard, cried
out,--"_C'est ta maîtresse à Saint-Pierre--elle est morte,--elle vient
te chercher._" And I looked so serious that Arnoux burst into a laugh as
loud as the surf outside.
Now when I saw that bat, I thought it was "weird,"--_drôle_ as the
other. I even found myself wondering, Who it could be? I thought it
might be Clemence, about whose death I received news in my last letter.
I did not think for a moment it was Gould. Only some very poor simple
soul would avail itself of so humble a vehicle for apparition.... Then
it looked so much like something damned as it moved about, that I felt
ashamed of thinking it could be Clemence,--the best kind of old souls,
Clemence!--My _blanchisseuse_. It was not easy to catch the bat without
hurting it. I argued that if it was anybody I knew it could not be
afraid of me. It sat on the mirror. It went under the table. It
flattened under the trunk and feigned death. Then I caught it in my hat;
and it revealed its plain nature by burying its teeth in my finger; and
it would not let go,--and it squeaked and chippered like a ghost. I was
almost mad enough to hurt it; but I tried to caress its head, which felt
soft and nice. But it showed all its teeth and looked too ugly, and
there was a musky smell of hell about it--so that I knew, if it were
anybody, the place with a capital "P" where it came from. I put it in a
box. To-night I am going to let it go.
With love to you,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO GEORGE M. GOULD
1889.
MY MOST DEAR GOULD,--I am really quite lonesome for you, and am
reflecting how much more lonesome I shall be in some outrageous
equatorial country where I shall not see you any more;--also it seems to
me perfectly and inexplainably atrocious to know that some day or other
there will be no Gould at 119 S. 17th St. That I should cease to make a
shadow some day seems quite natural, because Hearn is only a bubble
anyhow ("the earth hath bubbles"),--but you, hating mysteries and seeing
and feeling and knowing everything,--you have no right ever to die at
all. And I can't help doubting whether you will. You have almost made me
believe what you do not believe yourself,--that there are souls. I
haven't any, I know; but I think you have,--something electrical and
luminous inside you that will walk about and see things always. Are you
really--what I see of you--only an envelope of something subtler and
perpetual? Because if you are, I might want you to pass down some day
southward,--over the blue zone and the volcanic peaks like a little
wind,--and flutter through the palm-plumes under the all-purifying
sun,--and reach down through old roots to the bones of me, and try to
raise me up.
"Ruth" maketh progress; but I had to murder the "Mother of God." Anyhow
the simile would have had a Catholic idolatrousness about it, so that I
don't regret it.--I send a clipping I found in the trunk, to make you
laugh: the "Femmes Arabes" of Dr. Perron furnished me the facts.--Mrs.
Gould moveth or reposeth in serenity,--Jakey fulfilleth with becoming
dignity the duties devolved upon him. I have consumed one plug of
"Quaker City;" but as the smoke spires up, the spiritual-sensualism of
"Ruth" becometh manifest.
There has been some rain almost worthy of the tropics,--and much
darkness. And I can understand better why the ancients of Yucatan,
accustomed to the charm of real physical light (about which you
Northerners know nothing), put no fire into their hell, but darkness
only, as woe enough for tropical souls to bear!
I hope you are having a glorious, joyous journeying, and remain,
Lovingly yours,
HEARN.
TO ----
1889.
I am very sorry your trip was a chilly and rainy one. As for me, I have
been shivering here, and have got to get South somewhere soon,--if only
till I can get back to the tropics. I am sorry to confess it; but the
tropical Circe bewitches me again--I must go back to her.
I had such a queer dream last night. A great, warm garden with high
clipped hedges,--much higher than a man,--and a sort of pleasant
country-house, with steps leading into the garden,--and everywhere, even
on the steps, hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there,--he told me he
was going to Europe never to come back. And you were there, too, all in
black silk--sheathed in it; you were also going away somewhere; and I
was packing for you, getting things ready. Everybody was saying nice
things: one did not seem to hear,--really one never hears voices in
dreams,--but one feels the words, tones and all, as if they passed
unspoken--just the soul or will of them only--out of one brain into
another. I can't remember what anybody said precisely: what I recollect
best is the sensation that everybody was going, and that I was to stay
all alone in the place, or anywhere I pleased; and it was getting dark.
Then I woke up, and said: "Well, I really must see her." I suppose
dreams mean nothing: but interpreted by the contrary, as is a custom, it
would mean the reverse--that I am going away somewhere,--which I don't
yet know.
Always and in all things yours,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P. S. Oh!--you spoke about Philadelphia.... Is it possible you have
never seen it? Is it possible you have never seen Fairmount Park?
Believe me, then, that it is the most beautiful place of the whole
civilized world on any sunny, tepid summer day. Your Central Park is a
cabbage-garden by comparison: F. Pk. is fifteen miles long, by about
eight or ten broad. But the size is nothing. It is the beauty of the
woods and their vistas, the long drives by the river, the glimpse of
statuary and fountains from delightful terraces, the knolls commanding
the whole circle of the horizon, the vast garden and lawn spaces, the
shadowed alleys where 100,000 people make scarcely any more sound than a
swarm of bees,--and over it all such a soft, sweet dreamy light. (When
you go to see it, be sure to choose a sunny, _warm_ day.) Thousands of
thousands of carriages file by, each with a pair of lovers in it.
Everybody in the park seems to be making love to somebody. Love is so
much the atmosphere of the place,--a part of the light and calm and
perfume--that you feel as if drenched with it, permeated by it,
mesmerized. And if you are all alone, you will look about you once in a
while, wondering that somebody else is not beside you.... But I forgot
that I am not writing to a stupid man, like myself.
L. H.
TO ----
NEW YORK, November, 1889.
Oh! you splendid girl!--will it really give you some short pleasure to
see this old humbug's writing again?... I was very sorry not to have
been able to see you: I should have wished to be able to give you a few
bits of advice about precautions to take during the tropical part of
your trip. But I have faith in your superb constitution and youth,--and
trust this will reach eyes undimmed by fever, and brightened more than
ever by the glow of all the strange suns that will have shone upon you.
So that is my dream that I wrote you about: it was you, not I, that were
to run away. But I did not help you to do your packing, as I imagined.
I wonder if you went away in black silk, or black cashmere: I dreamed of
you all in black that time. And 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.
For seldom as I saw you, I must tell you that I looked forward to such
visits as to something very delightful, that helped me to forget the
great iron-whirling world and everything in it but yourself. You made a
little circle of magnetic sunshine for me; and you know I liked to bask
in it so much that I used to be quite selfish about it. I feel now as
though, each night I sat up so late in your little parlour, I was taking
from you so much rest,--which means life and strength,--acted, in short,
the part of a psychical cannibal! And I am remorseful at not being able
to feel more remorseful than I do; it was so nice to be there that I
can't be properly sorry, as I should.
I and my friends have been wagering upon you, hoping for you, praying
for you to win your race,--so that every one may admire you still more,
and your name be flashed 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 never are the same person two minutes in
succession, I am partly consoled: it could only be one small phase of
you,--Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!
--And you found the loose bar at last, and shook it out, and flew! I
much doubt if they will ever get you well into the cage again,--that was
so irksome to you. But perhaps the world itself will seem a cage to you
hereafter:--it will have grown so much smaller in that blue-flashing
circuit of yours about it. Perhaps when human society shall have become
infinitely more fluid and electric than at present,--which it is sure to
do with the expansion and increasing complexity of intercommunication by
steam and wire,--this little half-dead planet will seem too small to
mankind. One will feel upon it, in the light of a larger knowledge,
constrained almost as much as Simon on the top of his pillar,--and long,
like him, for birth into a larger mode of being. Even now there is no
more fleeing into strange countries,--because there are no strange
countries: everything is being interbound and interspersed with steel
rails and lightning wires;--there are no more mysteries,--except what
are called hearts, those points at which individualities rarely touch
each other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a
ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out
of soul-sight.
--Did you often wish to stop somewhere, and feel hearts beating about
you, and see the faces of gods and dancing-girls? Or were you petted
like the _Lady of the Aroostook_ by officers and crew,--and British
dignitaries eager to win one Circe-smile,--and superb Indian Colonels of
princely houses returning home,--that you had no chance to regret
anything? I have been so afraid of never seeing you again, that I have
been hating splendid imaginary foreigners in dreams,--which would have
been quite wickedly selfish if I had been awake!...
With every true good wish and sincere affection,
Your friend,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ----
March 7-8, 1890.
I must write you a line or two, before I finish packing,--though it is
the hour of ghosts, when writing is a grave imprudence. Something makes
me write you nevertheless.
I could not go to see Mr. M----: there was too much ice and snow. But
you can forgive _that_.
I shall be very sorry not to see you again,--and this time, you are not
sorry to know I am going away as you were when I went South. Perhaps you
are quite right....
--But that is nothing. What I want to say is, that after looking at your
portrait, I must tell you how sweet and infinitely good you ... can be,
and how much I like you, and how I like you,--or at least _some_ of
those many who are one in you.
I might say love you,--as we love those who are dead--(the dead who
still shape lives);--but which, or how many, of you I cannot say. One
looks at me from your picture; but I have seen others, equally pleasing
and less mysterious.
... Not when you were in evening dress, because you were then too
beautiful; and what is thus beautiful is not that which is most charming
in you. It only dazzles one, and constrains.... I like you best in the
simple dark dress, when I can forget everything except all the souls of
you. Turn by turn one or other floats up from the depth within and
rushes to your face and transfigures it;--and that one which made you
smile with pleasure like a child at something pretty we were both
admiring is simply divine.... I do not think you really know how sacred
you are; and yet you ought to know: it is because you do not know what
is in you, _who_ are in you, that you say such strangely material
things. And you yourself, by being, utterly contradict them all.
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;--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. There was such a child-beauty in that smile.... 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 you 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.
--Forgive all my horrid ways, my dear, sweet, ghostly sister.
Good-bye,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
END OF VOLUME I
Transcriber's Note
The following list contains questionable spellings (and the pages upon
which they appeared) all of which have been retained:
befel (116); Buddist (142); begining (146); bazar (149, 342)
There are also some constructions that seem questionable. Punctuation
errors have been corrected.
p. 138 | unimportant detail and [banal ana] | banaliana?
| |
p. 152 | he was so enthusiastic[ally] that | sic
| |
p. 183 | spectre is the ?--"Where shall I go? | '?' stands for
| | 'question'.
| |
p. 329 | Very truly your friend[./,] | Corrected.
| |
p. 387 | the simple hook-mark "?"[.] I can | A full stop is needed.
| imagine |
| |
p. 410 | wildest dreams[,/.] The artistic | Corrected.