of all weeks the busiest. I did not visit your home yesterday, because
I had an assignment at the same hour in the east end, for the purpose
of examining a smoke-consumer. If you had written me the day before, I
could have made proper arrangements to come. You must think me capable
of a little meanness to suppose that I would be discourteous enough
to desire a _revanche_ for your impulsive expression of an impulse. I
understand why you returned my letter, and I could not feel offended.
XV
DEAR LADY: You must not ask me to forgive you, because I have nothing
to forgive; and you must not speak of my being angry with you,
because I was not angry with you at all. I wrote sharply, and perhaps
disagreeably, because I felt that to do so would most speedily relieve
you from your embarrassment; and sympathized sufficiently with your
error to suffer with you. I entered into your feelings much more
thoroughly, I believe, than you had any idea of, and I only deferred
writing last night because I was fairly tired out with hard work. I
have made many mistakes similar to yours; and felt similar regrets; and
felt my face burn as though pricked with ten thousand needles, even
when lying in bed in the dark, to think that a friend had betrayed some
tender little confidence which might be turned into sinister ridicule.
I was very, very sorry to feel that you had suffered similarly.
So, dear Lady, I feel generally very reluctant to unbosom myself
on paper, not knowing who might behold the exposition, and sneer
at it without being capable of understanding it. We all have two
natures,--the one is our every-day garb of mannerism; the other we
strived to keep draped, like a snow-limbed statue of Psyche, half
guarded from unæsthetic eyes by a semi-diaphanous veil. This veiled
nature is delicate as the wings of a butterfly, the gossamer web
visible only when the sunlight catches it, or the frost-flowers on a
window-pane. It will bear no rude touches--no careless handling. It is
tenderer than the mythic blossom which bled when plucked, and its very
tenderness enhances its capacity for suffering.
You may hear many things which on the impulse of the moment might
affect you unpleasantly; but you need never yield to such an impulse. I
am very well known in the city; and you might often hear people speak
of me, but you must not think foolish things, or dream annoying dreams
therefor....
What a funny little bundle of pretty contradictions your letter is! How
can I answer it? By word of pen? No, not at all. I must only say that I
like you quite as much--well, at least nearly as much--as you say that
you wish. I won't say "quite," because I don't know myself, and how can
I yet know you?
IONIKOE
XVI
DEAR LADY,--I remember having once been severely chided by a hoary
friend of mine--a white-bearded Mentor--because I had just received
a present from a friend, and had impulsively exclaimed, "Do tell me
what I shall give him in return!" "Give in return!" quoth Mentor. "What
for?--to destroy your little obligations of gratitude?--to insult
your friend by practically intimating that you believe he expected
something in return? Don't send him anything save thanks." Well, I
didn't. But when I received your exquisite little gift this morning,
I thought of writing, "How can I return your kindness," &c.; and now,
calling my old friend's advice to mind, I shall only say, "Thanks,
dear Lady." Still, flowers and me _[sic]_ have so little in common,
that much as I love them, I feel I ought not to be near them,--just
as one who loves a woman so passionately that his dearest wish is to
kiss her footprints; or as Kingsley's Norseman, who threw himself at
the feet of the fair-haired priestess, crying, "Trample on me! spit on
me! I am not worthy to be trod upon by your feet." Of course this is
an extravagant simile; but the nature of a man is so coarse and rude
compared with the fragrance and beauty of the flowers, that he feels in
a purer atmosphere when they are breathing perfume about him. Flowers
do seem to me like ghosts of maidens, like "that maid whom Gwydion made
by glamour out of flowers."
Just fancy!--I was smoking a very poor cigar when the basket of
blossoms came up to my rooms; and the odor of tobacco in the presence
of the flowers seemed sacrilegious. I felt like the toad in Edgar
Fawcett's poem. Perhaps you do not know that little poem, as it has not
yet been published in book form. So I will quote it; but do not think
me sentimental.
"TO A TOAD
"_Blue dusk, that brings the dewy hours_,
_Brings thee, of graceless form in sooth,_
_Dark stumbler at the roots of flowers;_
_Flaccidy inert, uncouth_.
"_Right ill can human wonder guess_
_Thy meaning or thy mission here,_
_Gray lump of mottled clamminess_--
_With that preposterous leer!_
"_But when I see thy dull bulk where_
_Luxurious roses bend and burny_
_Or some slim lily lifts to air_
_Her frail and fragrant urn,_--
"_Of these, among the garden ways_,
_So grim a watcher dost thou seem_
_That I, with meditative gaze_
_Look down on thee and dream_
"_Of thick-lipped slaves, with ebon skin,_
_That squat in hideous dumb repose_
_And guard the drowsy ladies in_
_Their still seraglios_"
And talking of little roses, luxurious roses, I like them because of
the fancies they evoke; their leaves and odor seem of kinship to the
lips and the breath of a fair woman,--the lips of a woman humid with
fresh kisses as the heart of the rose is humid with dews,--lips curled
like the petals of the pink flower, recalling those of Swinburne's
"Faustine"--
"_Curled lips, long since half kissed away,_
_Still sweet and keen"_
Dear lady, you sent me a very æsthetic present; and I fear I have
written you a very sentimental letter. But if you don't want such
effusions, you must not send me such flowers. I received your last
few lines, and feel much relieved to find I have not offended you
by my foolish letter. I cannot sit down late at night without
saying something outrageous; and I must be possessed by the Devil of
Heterophemy.
Very sincerely yours,
L. HEARN
Letters of Ozias Midwinter
"After this perhaps you will recognize the signature OZIAS MIDWINTER.
It was taken from Wilkie Collins's 'Armadale.'" This brief postal-card
message to his friend, Mr. Henry Watkin, written from New Orleans,
November 15, 1877, is the valuable clue that leads to a discovery of
a vein of work done by Lafcadio Hearn,--work that perhaps in after
years he came to scorn, if not to forget. But for this information,
imparted to a friend by Hearn himself, the "Letters of Ozias Midwinter"
would doubtless lie undisturbed in their dusty tomb,--the files of
the newspaper of yester-year. There may be those who will decry this
resurrection of forgotten things; who will say it was the hack-work
of a starving man; that it were better left undisturbed. They have
a right to their opinion. Nevertheless, with due respect: to them,
there are things in these letters as good as anything Hearn ever
wrote. More than that, they reveal the whole trend of his mind; they
foreshadow the things that were to interest him in the West Indies
and in Japan,--the little mysteries of life, the poetry of names,
the melody of folk-songs, the fascination of old things. The very
adoption of the name of Ozias Midwinter is significant. Already at
twenty-seven Hearn was too true a critic of real literature to imagine
for a moment that "Armadale" was a book that was worth while; but there
were things in this practically forgotten story that appealed to him
with peculiar force, things that to him seemed almost as if they might
have been written concerning himself. Hearn at times felt that his very
name was ugly. In "Armadale" we read, "the strangely uncouth name of
Ozias Midwinter;" and again: "It is so remarkably ugly that it must
be genuine. No sane human being would, assume such a name as Ozias
Midwinter."
His diminutive appearance was a sore point with Hearn. "Armadale"
depicts Midwinter as "young and slim and under-sized."
There was something foreign-looking about Hearn. His fictional hero was
thus described: "His tawny complexion, his large bright brown eyes,
and his black beard gave him something of a foreign look.... His dusky
hands were wiry and nervous."
Hearn, by reason of the peculiar appearance of his eyes, more often
repelled than attracted people. He could therefore sympathize with
Midwinter, who says: "I produced a disagreeable impression at first
sight. I couldn't mend it afterwards."
A few more quotations will complete the picture and further make clear
the fascination this character in a poor novel had for Hearn. The
latter was from the start remarkably shy. He avoided the generality of
men. For years he had been a failure in life. Everything he had tried
had somehow fallen far below his expectations. Indeed, at the very
time he was writing the Midwinter letters he was tramping the streets,
going from newspaper office to office in New Orleans seeking work. Let
us see now how these things in the life of Hearn correspond with the
description of Midwinter: "From first to last the man's real character
shrank back with a savage shyness from the rector's touch."
And again: "It mattered little what he tried: failure (for which nobody
was ever to blame but himself) was sure to be the end of it, sooner
or later. Friends to assist him he had none to apply to; and as for
relations, he wished to be excused from speaking of them. For all he
knew of them they might be dead, and for all they knew he might be
dead."
And finally: "Ozias Midwinter at twenty spoke of his life as Ozias
Midwinter at seventy might have spoken, with a long weariness of years
on him which he had learned to bear patiently."
So much for the pseudonym. Now for the work to which it was attached.
In after years, when Hearn had begun to attain a degree of prosperity,
he either forgot something of the hard days, or, for some reason known
to himself, told a pleasing fiction about them. Thus, in one letter
that was made public shortly after his death, he says he went South
from Cincinnati on a vacation, saw the blue and gold of Southern days,
and determined to abide in such a climate forever. It has already been
made clear in his letters to Mr. Watkin that he went South because the
_wanderlust_ was upon him, because he had begun to hate Cincinnati,
because he felt that he must find more congenial work elsewhere.
Whatever enthusiasts in Cincinnati and New Orleans may say now, he
was not a good reporter in the present-day acceptance of the term.
There was, on his part, a fancy for fine writing, for rhetoric, which
the city editors of three decades ago may have admired, but which at
present would be most vigorously blue-pencilled. A youthful Hearn
to-day would have a rather hard time in Cincinnati, where the cry is
for facts and again facts, and then for brevity and then once more for
brevity. If Hearn did not come up to the modern standards of newspaper
reporting, neither did he come up to the modern ideals of newspaper
correspondence. It is probable that few papers to-day would tolerate
the particular kind of "news letter" that Hearn sent to the Cincinnati
_Commercial_ in the years 1877 and 1878. It was in a day when the
telegraph service was not so well developed as at present, and the news
letters from Washington, Boston, New York, New Orleans, and London
were a regular feature. There are few newspapers to-day which contain
letters by men so eminent in after years as two of the _Commercial_
correspondents became,--Hearn and Moncure D. Conway, also for some time
a resident of Cincinnati and afterwards correspondent from London.
Few if any of Hearn's "news letters" made any pretence at giving
news. As far as the style of them was concerned, they might have been
written for his friend Watkin alone, instead of for a great Ohio valley
newspaper, catering to a considerable clientèle. He chose what subjects
interested him, not what were presumed to interest the readers of the
paper. In days when Louisiana's political affairs were still in the
turmoil of the reconstruction period, when the North was still keenly
watching events in the "rebel" South, Hearn had few if any references
to these matters.
As near an approach as any to a news letter was his first one, sent
from Memphis, November 6, 1877, when he wrote some "Notes on Forrest's
Funeral." In this he related how he saw the funeral of General N. B.
Forrest, the great Confederate cavalryman, told some anecdotes of the
dead man's bravery and savagery, and gave his ancestry and an outline
of his life.
Then he proceeded: "Old citizens of Memphis mildly described him to me
as a 'terror.' He would knock a man down upon the least provocation,
and whether with or without weapons, there were few people in the city
whom he could not worst in a fight. Imagine a man about six feet three
inches in height, very sinewy and active, with a vigorous, rugged
face, bright grey eyes that almost always look fierce, eyebrows that
seem always on the verge of a frown, and dark brown hair and chin
beard, with strong inclination to curl, and you have some idea of
Forrest's appearance before his last illness. He was, further, one of
the most arbitrary, imperious, and determined men that it is possible
to conceive of holding a high position in a civilized community. Rough,
rugged, desperate, uncultured, his character fitted him rather for the
life of the borderer than the planter; he seemed by nature a typical
pioneer,--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a
kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilization."
This is straightforward and vivid enough. But it was impossible for this
dreamer of weird dreams to go through a whole letter in this fashion,
and so we have the following, which, well written as it is, would
scandalize the modern telegraph editor handling the correspondence:
"The same night they buried him, there came a storm. From the same room
whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the Northern mists crossing
the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading army; then came grey
rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild charges through it all.
Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that the dead Confederate
cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader, were fighting ghostly
battles with the men who died for the Union."
The hustling, bustling Memphis of to-day is a far different place
from the decayed, war-stricken town that the vagrant newspaper man
saw. Its ruin, its damp days and nights, depressed him. In a letter
of November 23, 1877, he recorded his impressions in a way that would
doubtless to-day appeal strongly to the memory of the older generation
of Memphians, who have not become used to the new order of things:
"The antiquity of the name of Memphis--a name suggesting vastness and
ruin--compels something of a reverential feeling; and I approached the
Memphis of the Mississippi dreaming solemnly of the Memphis of the
Nile. I found the great cotton mart truly Egyptian in its melancholy
decay, and not, therefore, wholly unworthy of its appellation.
Tenantless warehouses with shattered windows; poverty-stricken hotels
that vainly strive to keep up appearances; rows of once splendid
buildings, from whose façades the paint has almost all scaled off;
mock stone fronts, whence the stucco has fallen in patches, exposing
the humble brick reality underneath; dinginess, dirt, and dismal
dilapidation greet the eye at every turn. The city's life seems to
have contracted about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its
body paralyzed. Its commercial pulse appears to beat very feebly. It
gives one the impression of a place that had been stricken by some
great misfortune beyond hope of recovery. Yet Memphis still handles one
fifth of the annual cotton crop,--often more than a million bales in
a season,--and in this great branch of commerce the city will always
hold its own, though fine buildings crumble and debts accumulate and
warehouses lie vacant.... But when rain and white fogs come, the
melancholy of Memphis becomes absolutely Stygian: all things wooden
utter strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of
stucco sweat as in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy
brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flows dimly,--a spectral river,
a Styx-flood, with pale mists lingering like Shades upon its banks,
waiting for that ghostly ferryman, the wind."
In this letter occurred a quaint passage, illustrating at the same time
the wide range of Hearn's reading and the curious paths into which he
had allowed his mind to stray: "Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea
of the vastness of imperial Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city
to be collected together and heaped up before him. Estimated by such a
method, the size of Memphis would appear vast enough to have astonished
even Elagabalus."
However, brief as was his stay in Memphis, disagreeable as were most
of his impressions, he found time to fall in love with one little
piece of sculpture, thus charmingly described as "a little nude Venus
at the street fountain, who has become all of one dusky greyish-green
hue, preserving her youth only in the beauty of her rounded figure and
unwrinkled comeliness of face." In this letter he detailed something
of his journey down the river, chronicled his delight in the Southern
sunsets, and finally arrived at the first of his promised lands: "The
daylight faded away, and the stars came out, but that warm glow in the
southern horizon only paled so that it seemed a little further off. The
river broadened till it looked, with the tropical verdure of its banks,
like the Ganges, until at last there loomed up a vast line of shadows,
dotted with points of light, and through a forest of masts and a host
of phantom-white river boats and a wilderness of chimneys the _Thompson
Dean_, singing her cheery challenge, steamed up to the mighty levee of
New Orleans."
In his next letter, dated November 26, 1877, he described his first
impressions "at the gates of the Tropics." He came across things that
reminded him of London and of Paris and evoked memories of his youth:
"Eighteen miles of levee! London, with all the gloomy vastness of her
docks and her 'river of ten thousand masts,' can offer no spectacle so
picturesquely attractive and so varied in the attraction." And again:
"Canal Street, with its grand breadth and imposing façades, gives one
recollections of London and Oxford Street and Regent Street." He went
to the French market, still one of the great sights of the city, and
could not write enough about it:
"The markets of London are less brightly clean and neatly arranged;
the markets of Paris are less picturesque." Even a cotton-press seen
at the cotton landing was an event to be celebrated. The thing was to
him not merely a piece of ingenious machinery; it was something weird,
something demoniac: "Fancy a monstrous head of living iron and brass,
fifty feet high from its junction with the ground, having jointed gaps
in its face like Gothic eyes, a mouth five feet wide, opening six feet
from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw to the mastodon teeth in the
upper jaw. The lower jaw alone moves, as in living beings, and it is
worked by two vast iron tendons, long and thick and solid as church
pillars. The surface of this lower jaw is equivalent to six square
feet. The more I looked at the thing, the more I felt as though its
prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct
animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles
moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws
opened with a low roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended
to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was
an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning
mouth. The titan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed, silently,
steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened down to
sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches,--positively
less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether.
But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw remained stationary
and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine
began to look as hideous as one of those horrible yawning heads which
formed the gates of the teocallis at Palenque, and through whose awful
jaws the sacrificial victims passed."
On December 7, 1877, he dived into more serious and even more practical
things. This man, to whom colored races were always of the deepest
interest, who had prowled around the negro quarters of Cincinnati for
songs and melodies and superstitions, around the Chinese laundries for
chance discoveries of strange musical instruments from the Orient,
after a residence in the South of one month, discussed a question which
is still agitating the country and which threatens to trouble it for
many years to come,--the negro question. Charles Gayarré of Louisiana
had written an article for the _North American Review_ entitled "The
Southern Question." Hearn, who certainly cannot be accused of prejudice
against colored peoples, agreed with the Southern writer that white
supremacy was necessary for Southern peace and prosperity. He felt that
the particular menace of the whites was from the mixed breeds, whose
black blood had just enough alloy to make them despise the simplicity
and faithfulness of the lowly "darky" of the old régime and aspire
to more rights and more privileges. Recently a Southern thinker has
written a book to show that, in the inexorable law of the survival
of the fittest, the ten million negroes must be swept aside by the
seventy million whites of this land, and finally perish from the face
of the earth, as do all the weaker races. Nearly three decades ago
Hearn came to the same conclusion,--a conclusion not expressed without
some feeling of fondness for the race: "As for the black man, he must
disappear with the years. Dependent like the ivy, he needs some strong
oak-like friend to cling to. His support has been cut from him, and
his life must wither in its prostrate helplessness. Will he leave no
trace of his past in the fields made fertile by his mighty labors, no
memory of his presence in this fair land he made rich in vain? Ah, yes!
the echo of the sweetly melancholy songs of slavery,--the weird and
beautiful melodies born in the hearts of the poor, childlike people to
whom freedom was destruction."
By the time he sent his next letter, dated December 10, 1877, he
had again been wandering about the city. He visited the old Spanish
cathedral founded by Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor and Alferez Real
of his Most Catholic Majesty. This is the church that is always
referred to as the "French cathedral." Hearn described its two ancient
tombs,--that of Almonaster, who died in 1708, and then that of the
French noble family of De Marigny de Mandeville, scions of which died
and were buried there in 1728, 1779, and 1800. Hearn had his own
reflections over the matter just as Irving had in Westminster Abbey:
"O Knights of the Ancient Régime, the feet of the plebeians are
blotting out your escutcheons; the overthrowers of throned Powers pass
by your tombs with a smile of complacency; the callous knees of the
poorest poor will erelong obliterate your carven memory from the stone;
the very places of your dwelling have crumbled out of sight and out
of remembrance. The glory of Versailles has passed away; 'the spider
taketh hold with his hands, and is in the palaces of Kings.'"
From musings in the cathedral he passed into a disquisition on
language. He held that the French tongue sounded better to him from
the mouth of a negro than did the harsher English. Southern speech
flows melodiously from the negro's lips, being musically akin to
the many-vowelled languages of Africa. The _th's_ and _thr's,_ the
difficult diphthongs and guttural _rr's_ of English and German, have
a certain rude Northern strength beyond the mastery of Ethiopian lips.
He finds that the Louisiana blacks speak a corrupted French, often
called "Creole," which is not the Creole of the Antilles. This recalls
to him a memory of his childhood in England and gives also a foretaste
of what he was to do ten years later, when Harpers gave him a chance to
describe what he felt and saw in the French West Indies: