sweetest of all dialects, the Creole of the Antilles. I had first
heard it spoken in England by the children of an English family
from Trinidad, who were visiting relatives in the mother country,
and I could never forget its melody. In Martinique and elsewhere it
has almost a written dialect; the school-children used to study the
'Creole catechism,' and priests used to preach to their congregations
in Creole. You cannot help falling in love with it after having once
heard it spoken by young lips, unless indeed you have no poetry in
your composition, no music in your soul. It is the most liquid,
mellow, languid language in the world. It is especially a language for
love-making. It sounds like pretty baby-talk; it woos like the cooing
of a dove. It seems to be a mixture of French, a little Spanish, and
West African dialects,--those negro dialects that are voluminous with
vowels. You can imagine how smooth it is from the fact that in West
Indian Creole the letter _r_ is never pronounced; and the Europeans
of the Indies complain that once their children have learned to speak
Creole, it is hard to teach them to pronounce any other language
correctly. They will say 'b'ed' for bread and 't'ed' for thread. So
that it is a sort of wopsy-popsy-ootsy-tootsy language."
And from this affectionate passage he is led to speak of Creole
satires. During the Republican régime in New Orleans after the Civil
War there was a witty, bitter, and brilliant French paper called _Le
Carillon_, which designated Republicans by a new term, "Radicanailles,"
which seemed exceedingly satisfying to the proud aristocracy,--this
word compounded of "radical" and _"canaille"_ The paper used to print
Creole satires. One was on ex-Governor Antoine, in the form of a parody
upon "La Fille de Madame Angot." Now Hearn's ambition was to write a
sinuous, silvern, poetical prose. He rarely attempted verse. In his
better known books on Japan his versions of Japanese songs and poems
are in prose. So, too, in these letters all his renderings of the
things that attracted him are in prose. Here is his version of the
satire just mentioned, redolent as it is of an era of bitterness:
I
"In the old days before the war, I was a slave at Caddo [Parish]. I
tilled the earth and raised sweet potatoes and water-melons. Then
afterwards I left the plough and took up the razor to shave folks in
the street,--white and black, too. But that, that was before the war.
II
"When Banks went up the river (Red River) with soldiers and with
cannon, I changed my career. Then I became a runaway slave. I married
my own cousin, who is at this hour my wife. She--she attended to the
kitchen. I--I sought for honors. But that, that was during the war.
III
"And then afterward in the custom-house men called me Collector; and
then Louisiana named me her Senator; and then to show her confidence
the people made me Governor and called me His Eminence; and that is
what I am at this present hour. And that, that is since the war."
From this, with the inconsequential air of a butterfly, he turned to
the subject of the Greeks of New Orleans,--a subject that must have
lain near to his heart by reason of the deep love he bore for his
Greek mother. Among the New Orleans people he mentioned was one Greek
gentleman: "I never met a finer old man. Though more than seventy years
of age, his face was still as firmly outlined, as clearly cut, as an
antique cameo; its traits recalled memories of old marbles, portraits
in stone of Aristophanes and Sophocles; it bespoke a grand blending
of cynicism and poetry."
But the sons of Hellas were not all alike satisfactory to his
fastidious taste: "There are many Greeks, sailors and laborers, in New
Orleans; but I cannot say that they inspire one with dreams of Athens
or of Corinth, of Panathenaic processions or Panhellenic games. Their
faces are not numismatic; their forms are not athletic. Sometimes
you can discern a something national about a Greek steamboatman,--a
something characteristic which distinguishes him from the equally
swarthy Italian, Spaniard, 'Dago.' But that something is not of
antiquity; it is not inspirational. It is Byzantine, and one is apt to
dislike it. It reminds one of Taine's merciless criticism of the faces
of Byzantine art. But I have seen a few rare Hellenic types here, and
among these some beautiful Romaic girls,--maidens with faces to remind
you of the gracious vase paintings of antiquity." One would think he
had crammed this letter full enough of topics, but he had one more.
Throughout his life ghost stories were an obsession with him. They
run all through his books on Japan. Three decades ago he lamented:
"In these days ghosts have almost lost the power to interest us, for
we have become too familiar with their cloudy faces, and familiarity
begetteth contempt. An original ghost story is a luxury, and a rare
luxury at that."
He then told of a house on Melpomene Street, New Orleans, in which no
one could dwell in peace. If a person were so hardy and so skeptical
as to move in, he soon found his furniture scattered, and his carpets
torn up by invisible hands. Ghostly feet shook the house with their
terrible steps; ghostly hands opened bolted doors as if locks did not
exist,--so that by and by no one came to live in the old place any more:
"As the years flitted by the goblin of Decay added himself to the
number of the Haunters; the walls crumbled, and the floors yielded, and
grass, livid and ghastly looking grass, forced its pale way between the
chinks of the planks in the parlor. The windows fell into ruin, and the
wind entered freely to play with the ghosts, and cried weirdly in the
vacant room."
Then one night Chief of Police Leary and six of his most stalwart men
determined to stand watch in the building and solve the mystery. They
placed candles in one of the rooms, and towards midnight stood in a
hollow square, with Chief Leary in the middle, so that he could aid
his men to repel an attack from any quarter whatsoever. The ghosts
blew out the lighted candles and, to this extent, were commonplace
enough. But the next instant they displayed their complete ingenuity
and originality by seizing the seven guardians of the peace and hurling
them violently against the ceiling. Hearn adds, with a touch of playful
humor: "The city of New Orleans would not pay the doctors' bills of men
injured while in the discharge of their duty."
By December 17, 1877, he had become interested in the past and present
of "Los Criollos," the Creoles, who were to be such a fascinating
subject to him when he visited Martinique and other enchanted isles of
the Caribbean.
In this first letter on the subject he corrected the common error
of speaking of mulattoes, quadroons, and octaroons of Louisiana as
Creoles,--a mistake which curiously enough he himself made in his
book, "Ghombo Zhebes," several years later. In this letter, however,
he correctly pointed out that no person with the slightest taint of
negro blood was a Creole, and that the common mistake was made not
only in the North, but also often in the South, where they should know
better; not only in America, but also in England, France, and Spain,
the former mother countries of all the West Indian colonists. "Creole,"
properly speaking, is the term applied to the pure-blooded offspring
of Europeans born in the colonies of South America or the West Indies,
to distinguish them from children of mixed blood born in the colonies
or of pure blood born in the mother country. In Louisiana, he pointed
out that it usually meant they were of French, more rarely of Spanish,
descent. He paid a tribute to the Creole society of New Orleans which
was made up of the descendants of all the early European settlers:
"Something of all that was noble and true and brilliant in the almost
forgotten life of the dead South lives here still (its atmosphere is
European; its tastes are governed by European literature and the art
culture of the Old World)." Hethen quoted some of the poems in the
patois of Louisiana and also some from Martinique that he had already
picked up.
On December 22 he devoted his attention to "New Orleans in Wet
Weather." He had much to say of its dampness and chills and fogs:
"Strange it is to observe the approach of one of these eerie fogs on
some fair night. The blue deeps above glow tenderly beyond the sharp
crescent of the moon; the heavens seem transformed to an infinite
ocean of liquid turquoise, made living with the palpitating life of
the throbbing stars. In this limpid clearness, this yellow, tropical
moonlight, objects are plainly visible at a distance of miles; far
sounds come to the ear with marvellous distinctness,--the clarion calls
of the boats, the long, loud panting of the cotton-presses, exhaling
steaming breath from their tireless lungs of steel.
"Suddenly sounds become fainter and fainter, as though the atmosphere
were made feeble by unaccountable enchantment; distant objects lose
distinctness; the heaven is cloudless, but her lights, low-burning and
dim, no longer make the night transparent, and a chill falls upon the
city, such as augurs the coming of a ghost. Then the ghost appears; the
invisible makes itself visible; a vast form of thin white mist seems to
clasp the whole night in its deathly embrace; the face of the moon is
hidden as with a grey veil, and the spectral fog extinguishes with its
chill breath the trembling flames of the stars."
Turning his thought to grave matters, he refers to the elevated tombs
in the cemeteries, which some irreverently call "bake ovens." Then
comes a touch of the playful, familiar enough to those who read the
present volume, but rare in his other books: "Fancy being asked by a
sexton whether you wished to have the remains of your wife or child
deposited in 'one of them bake ovens.'"
Again, with a swift turn of thought and subject, as if in conversation
with a friend or as if in a letter to him, he reverts to "Beast Ben
Butler" and his needless brutality in having carved on one of the
New Orleans statues, Clay's declaration against slavery and Andrew
Jackson's famous saying, "Our federal Union: it must be preserved."
The sight of Levantine sailors selling fruit in the markets caused him
to rhapsodize on the sea, giving the first of those prose poems in
which he was to wax almost lyrical in so many of his works: "If you,
O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if, in earliest childhood,
you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic
hymn-chant of the waves, which none can hear without awe, and which no
musician can learn; if you have ever watched wonderingly the far sails
of the fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of the sunset, or silver
under the moon, or golden in the glow of sunrise; if you once breathed
as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the
swimmer's art from the hoary breakers, and received the Ocean god's
christening, the glorious baptism of salt,--then perhaps you know only
too well why those sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes within the
heart of the land. Twenty years may have passed since your ears last
caught the thunder of that mighty ode of hexameters which the sea has
always sung and will sing forever,--since your eyes sought the far
line where the vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of
rolling waters,--since you breathed the breath of the ocean, and felt
its clear ozone living in your veins like an elixir. Have you forgotten
the mighty measure of that mighty song? Have you forgotten the divine
saltiness of that unfettered wind? Is not the spell of the sea strong
upon you still?...
"And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the midst of
the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea might come upon them in
the night, and phantom winds call wildly to them in their sleep, and
they might wake to find themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of
the breakers."
On December 27, 1877, already deeply interested in the niceties of
language, Hearn gave his Cincinnati readers a dissertation upon the
curiosities of Creole grammar, and quoted in Creole a weird love-song,
said to be of negro origin. He doubted whether it was really composed
by a negro, but remarked that its spirit was undoubtedly African. Then
he gave the following prose version of this exotic:
"_Since first I beheld you_, _Adele,_
_While dancing the calinda_,
_I have remained faithful to the thought of you;_
_My freedom has departed from me,_
_I care no longer for all other negresses;_
_I have no heart left for them;_--
_You have such grace and cunning:_--
_You are like the Congo serpent._
"_I love you too much, my beautiful one:_--
_I am not able to help it._
_My heart has become just like a grasshopper,--_
_It does nothing but leap._
_I have never met any woman_
_Who has so beautiful a form as yours._
_Your eyes flash flame;_
_Your body has enchained me captive._
"_Ah, you are so like the serpent-of-the-rattles_
_Who knows how to charm the little bird_,
_And who has a mouth ever ready for it_
_Yo serve it for a tomb._
_I have never known any negress_
_Who could walk with such grace as you can_.
_Or who could make such beautiful gestures;_
_Your body is a beautiful doll._
"_When I cannot see you, Adele_,
_I feel myself ready to die;_
_My life becomes like a candle_
_Which has almost burned itself out._
_I cannot then find anything in the world_
_Which is able to give me pleasure_:--
_I could well go down to the river_
_And throw myself in it that I might cease to suffer_.
"_Tell me if you have a man_,
_And I will make an ouanga charm for him:_
_I will make him turn into a phantom_,
_If you will only take me for your husband._
_I will not go to see you when you are cross;_
_Other women are mere trash to me;_
_I will make you very happy_
_And I will give you a beautiful Madras handkerchief._"
He freely admitted that the poem was untranslatable, that it lost its
weird beauty, its melody, its liquid softness, its languor, when put
into English. Then came a characteristic bit in which he displayed
the man who dwelt with delight upon the inner meaning of words,--the
delight felt only by the artist in language: "I think there is some
true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a
symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And
is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful
women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent
fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia? The French have a beautiful
verb expressive of this idea,--_serpenter_, 'to serpent,' to curve
in changing undulations like a lithe snake. The French artist speaks
of the outlines of a beautiful human body as serpenting,' curving and
winding like a serpent. Do you not like the word? I think it is so
expressive of flowinglines of elegance,--so full of that mystery of
grace which puzzled Solomon: 'the way of a serpent upon a rock.'"
On January 7, 1878, came a picture in prose, which now reminds us
of William Ernest Henley's "London Voluntary," in which the latter
described the splendor of a golden October day in the metropolis of the
world. Here is Christmas Eve in New Orleans: "Christmas Eve came in
with a blaze of orange glory in the west, and masses of lemon-colored
clouds piled up above the sunset. The whole city was filled with
orange-colored light, just before the sun went down; and between the
lemon-hued clouds and the blue were faint tints of green. The colors of
that sunset seemed a fairy mockery of the colors of the fruit booths
throughout the city; where the golden fruit lay piled up in luxuriant
heaps, and where the awnings of white canvas had been replaced by long
archways of interwoven orange branches with the fruit still glowing
upon them. It was an Orange Christmas."
Then at nightfall he passed the French opera house on Bourbon Street.
It was "dark and dead and silent," and as a matter of course the
dreamer had another vision: "Sometimes, when passing under the sharply
cut shadows of the building in a night of tropical moonlight, I fancy
that a shadowy performance of 'Don Giovanni' or 'Masaniello' must be
going on within for the entertainment of a ghostly audience; and that
if somebody would but open the doors an instant, one might catch a
glimpse of spectral splendor, of dusky-eyed beauties long dead,--of
forgotten faces pale with the sleep of battlefields,--of silks that
should be mouldering in mouldering chests with the fashions of twenty
years ago."
And finally this letter contained the following prophetic utterance
concerning the new South,--the South then not yet in existence, the
South that so nearly approximates what Hearn said it would be: "It is
the picturesqueness of the South, the poetry, the traditions, the
legends, the superstitions, the quaint faiths, the family prides, the
luxuriousness, the splendid indolence and the splendid sins of the
old social system which have passed, or which are now passing, away
forever.... The new South may, perhaps, become far richer than the old
South; but there will be no aristocracy, no lives of unbridled luxury,
no reckless splendors of hospitality, no mad pursuit of costliest
pleasures. The old hospitality has been starved to death, and leaves
no trace of its former being save the thin ghost of a romance. The new
South will be less magnificent, though wealthier; less generous, though
more self-denying; less poetical, though more cultured. The new cities
will be, probably, more prosperous and less picturesque than the old."
January 14, 1878, Hearn devoted his entire letter to W. C. C. Claiborne,
the first American governor of Louisiana. He told in what hostile
manner the American was received by the haughty Creole gentry, and
how he was alleged to have worn his hat at the theatre. It is in the
comment on this that Hearn most amusingly displays himself as an
Englishman, with the dim-seeing eyes of a Dickens or a saucy Kipling
rather than the clear-headed, clear-eyed American, or the adopted
citizen, understanding this country and its people: "I fancy that
wearing of the hat before those terribly cultivated and excruciatingly
courteous Creole audiences must have been at first a mere oversight;
but that poor Claiborne naturally got stubborn when such an outcry
was raised about it and, with an angry pride of manhood peculiar to
good American blood, swore 'by the Eternal' that he would wear his
hat wherever he pleased. Don't you almost wish you could slap him on
the shoulder with that truly American slap of approbation?" Of course
that is pure Dickens, the Dickens of "American Notes," just as is the
following rather amusing description of American newspapers in the good
years 1804, 1805, and 1806: "In those days the newspaper seems to have
been neither more nor less than a public spittoon,--every man flung his
quid of private opinion into it."
Hearn went to look at the Claiborne graves in the old St. Louis
cemetery on Basin Street. Throughout his life graveyards seemed to have
a fascination for him; but the following description of the St. Louis
cemetery is interesting because it proves, what has often been denied,
that part of Hearn's boyhood was spent in Wales: "This cemetery is one
of the most curious, and at the same time one of the most dilapidated,
in the world. I have seen old graveyards in the north of England, and
tombs in Wales, where names of the dead of three hundred years ago
may yet be read upon the mossy stones; but I have never seen so grim
a necropolis as the ruined Creole cemetery at New Orleans. There is
no order there, no regularity, no long piles of white obelisks, no
even ranks of grey tablets. The tombs seem to jostle one another; the
graveyard is a labyrinth in which one may easily lose oneself. Some of
the tombs are Roman in size and design; some are mere heaps of broken
brick; some are of the old-fashioned table form."
Readers of Hearn's books are familiar with those pages in which he
speaks of Japanese female names, and studies appellations in general.
This fancy was no new thing with him. As long ago as February 18, 1878,
he studied the curious nomenclature of New Orleans streets, revealing,
as it does, part of the history of the city, something of its old
gallant life, something of its old classical culture. He told how
Burgundy Street was named after the great duke; Dauphine is, of course,
self-explanatory, as are Louis XV and Royal and Bourbon. Governors
are represented by Carondelet, Galvez, and others; French and Spanish
piety, by such names as St. Bartholomy, St. Charles, and Annunciata.
The classicism, which so affected the traditions of French poetry
and the French stage, is here represented by-streets named Calliope,
Clio, Dryades, &c. Gallantry, "often wicked gallantry, I fear," is
commemorated by a number of streets christened with "the sweetest and
prettiest feminine names imaginable,--Adele, Celeste, Suzette, and
Annette."
Then he gave his readers some more of those Creole songs he was always
collecting, some of which as rich treasure he was afterwards to give to
his friend, Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, the musical critic. In this letter he
told how, when for the first time he read Daudet's novel, translated
under the title of "Sidonie," he was charmed with the refrain of a
Creole song, and determined, when in New Orleans, to procure the whole
poem. He recorded his disappointment in being able only to get one
stanza, which he translated as follows:
"_Others say it is your happiness;_
_I say, it is your sorrow:_
_When we are enchanted by love,_
_Farewell to all happiness!_
_Poor little Miss Zizi!_
_Poor little Miss Zizi!_
_Poor little Miss Zizi!_
_She has sorrow, sorrow, sorrow;_--
_She has sorrow in her heart!"_
Here is another bit, which seems to the Anglo-Saxon very uncouth and
unpoetical when given in bare, bald English, robbed of the oft-lisping
Creole melody:
_"If thou wert a little bird_,
_And I were a little gun,_
_I would shoot thee--bang!_
_Ah, dear little_
_Mahogany jewel_,
_I love thee as a little pig loves the mud?'_
The next is more charming. It is only a snatch, but it hints delicious
romance:
"_Delaide, my queen, the way is too long for me to travel;_--
_That way leads far up yonder._
_But, little as I am, I am going to stem the stream up there._
'_I, Liron, am come,' is what I shall say to them_.
'_My queen, good night; 'tis I, Liron, who have come.'"_
And finally there is this one, evidently of negro origin, made to
ridicule a mulatto girl named Toucouton, who tried to pass as white:
"_Ah, Toucouton!_
_I know you well:_
_You are like a blackamoor;_
_There is no soap_
_Which is white enough_
_To wash your skin._
"_When the white folks give a ball_,
_You are not able to go there;_
_Ah, how will you be able to play the flirt!_
_You who so love to shine?_
_Ah, Toucouton, &c._
_"Once you used to take a seat_
_Among the fashionable people_;
_Now you must take leave_, _decamps_
_Without any delay whatever_.
_Ah, Toucouton," &c._
We have seen that all these letters by Hearn were as if written for his
own pleasure or for the pleasure of a friend, but decidedly not for a
newspaper clientèle. After the "news" just referred to, there followed
two letters which would seem to indicate that the patient editor
besought his correspondent to come nearer to hard, prosaic news matters
and treat of the turmoil of Louisiana state affairs. Accordingly, on
March 24, 1878, there was a screed on of "Louisiana as It Is," treating
of the political questions, and finally another, on March 31, scouting
the possibility of forming a Hayes party in Louisiana. These letters
were written in so half-hearted a way that it was not at all surprising
to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by a new and more
ordinary name. Hearn was no longer the representative of the paper. He
went on record to the effect that he quit because the paper was slow
about paying him money, although he demanded the arrears time and time
again. The chances are that the _Commercial's_ readers stupidly wanted
more about politics and less about Creole love poetry. With the close
of this correspondence Hearn thus definitely closed all connexion with
the Cincinnati newspaper world.