Orleans was the father of the Hearn of the West Indies and of Japan.
Indeed, so far as his work was concerned, the same subjects interested
him throughout his life. This is not to say that he remained at a
standstill. On the contrary, he was constantly growing. Despite his
bad eyesight, he read incessantly, and his reading took a very wide
range. He labored to perfect his style. He struggled with words; he
used the file after a fashion to remind one of what Flaubert and
Stevenson have told us of themselves. But with a very wise knowledge
of his own sympathies and limitations, he chose exactly the topics
for his pen that could most surely stir his imagination. It is a
little singular, some seven years after his letters to the Cincinnati
newspaper, to find him writing practically the same kind of articles
and on the same subjects for _Harper's Weekly_. Hearn, then at the age
of thirty-five, anxious to have his things appear in some publication
with a circulation other than purely local, and anxious likewise to eke
out his slender income, managed to secure a commission from the house
of Harper. The firm had sent a staff artist to New Orleans to draw
sketches of the exposition of 1885. Hearn was to supply the descriptive
articles. His first appeared in _Harper's Weekly_ of January 3, 1885,
and was a straightforward account of the exposition. Of course with
a man of Hearn's temperament this could not last long, so it is not
surprising to see the next letter, which appeared on January 10, 1885,
devoted to "The Creole Patois."
"Although," he writes, "the pure Creole element is disappearing from
the 'Vie Faubon,' as Creole children call the antiquated part of New
Orleans, it is there, nevertheless, that the patois survives as a
current idiom; it is there one must dwell to hear it spoken in its
purity and to study its peculiarities of intonation and construction.
The patois-speaking inhabitants, dwelling mostly in those portions of
the quadrilateral furthest from the river and from the broad American
boundary of Canal Street,--which many of them never cross when they
can help it,--are not less bizarre than the architectural background
of their picturesque existence. The visitor is surrounded by a life
motley-colored as those fantastic populations described in the Story of
the Young King of the Black Isles; the African ebon is least visible,
but of bronze browns, banana yellows, orange golds, there are endless
varieties, paling off into faint lemon tints and even dead silver
whites. The paler the shade, the more strongly do Latin characteristics
show themselves; and the oval faces, with slender cheeks and low,
broad brows, prevail. Sometimes in the yellower types a curious Sphinx
visage appears, dreamy as Egypt. Occasionally also one may encounter
figures so lithe, so animal, as to recall the savage grace of Piou's
'Satyress.' For the true colorist the contrast of a light saffron skin
with dead black hair and eyes of liquid jet has a novel charm, as
of those descriptions in the Malay poem, Bida-sari,' of 'women like
statues of gold.' It is hard to persuade oneself that such types do
not belong to one distinct race, the remnant of some ancient island
tribe, and the sound of their richly vowelled Creole speech might
prolong the pleasant illusion."
Happening to mention an ocoroon, the very term starts him on a rhapsody:
"That word reminds one of a celebrated and vanished type,--never
mirrored upon canvas, yet not less physically worthy of artistic
preservation than those amber-tinted beauties glorified in the Oriental
studies of Ingres, of Richter, of Gérôme! Uncommonly tall were those
famous beauties, citrine-hued, elegant of stature as palmettoes, lithe
as serpents; never again will such types reappear upon American soil.
Daughters of luxury, artificial human growths, never organized to enter
the iron struggle for life unassisted and unprotected, they vanished
forever with the social system which made them a place apart as for
splendid plants reared within a conservatory. With the fall of American
feudalism the dainty glass house was dashed to pieces; the species
it contained have perished utterly; and whatever morality may have
gained, one cannot help thinking that art has lost something by their
extinction. What figures for designs in bronze! What tints for canvas!"
Then Hearn returns to the subject of the Creoles, and speaks of the
compilation of Creole proverbs of the Antilles and other places, but
of the lack of a similar work in Louisiana. It foreshadowed his own
"Ghombo Zhebes," then in the making. Reading his description of the
fugitive Creole literature, one regrets that Hearn did not find time
and opportunity to collect: it as he did the proverbs.
"The inedited Creole literature," says he, "comprised songs, satires
in rhyme, proverbs, fairy tales,--almost everything commonly included
under the term of folk-lore. The lyrical portion of it is opulent
in oddities, in melancholy beauties; Alphonse Daudet has frequently
borrowed therefrom, using Creole refrains in his novels with admirable
effect. Some of the popular songs possess a unique and almost weird
pathos; there is a strange, naïve sorrow in their burdens, as of
children sobbing for lonesomeness in the night. Others, on the
contrary, are inimitably comical. There are many ditties or ballads
devoted to episodes of old plantation life, to surreptitious frolic,
to description of singular industries and callings, to commemoration
of events which had strongly impressed the vivid imagination of
negroes,--a circus show, an unexpected holiday, the visit of a
beautiful stranger to the planter's home, or even some one of those
incidents indelibly marked with a crimson spatter upon the fierce
history of Louisiana politics."
On January 17, under the same caption, Hearn continued the subject,
giving some of the songs and speaking of their probable African
ancestry.
On January 31, once more under the general title of "The New Orleans
Exposition," Hearn turns with avidity to musings on the Japanese
exhibit. Right in the beginning we have this on art, remarkable, as
so much of Hearn's work was, for a vivid sense of color and form
despite his own difficulty in seeing: "What Japanese art of the best
era is unrivalled in--that characteristic in which, according even
to the confession of the best French art connoisseurs, it excels all
other art--is movement, the rhythm, the poetry of visible motion.
Great masters of the antique Japanese schools have been known to
devote a whole lifetime to the depiction of one kind of bird, one
variety of insect or reptile, alone. This specialization of art, as
Ary Renan admirably showed us in a recent essay, produced results
that no European master has ever been able to approach. A flight of
gulls sweeping through the gold light of a summer morning; a long
line of cranes sailing against a vermilion sky; a swallow twirling
its kite shape against the disk of the sun; the heavy, eccentric,
velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hoverings of moths
or splendid butterflies,--these are subjects the Japanese brush has
rendered with a sublimity of realism which might be imitated, perhaps,
but never surpassed. Except in the statues of gods or goddesses
(Buddhas which almost compel the Christian to share the religious
awe of their worshippers, or those charming virgins of the Japanese
heaven, 'slenderly supple as a beautiful lily'), the Japanese have
been far from successful in delineation of the human figure. But their
sculpture or painting of animal forms amazes by its grace; their bronze
tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, are not mere copies of nature: they
are exquisite idealizations of it."
Almost every paragraph seems to foreshadow some chapter in some one of
Hearn's future books on Japan. With a memory of his papers on Japanese
inserts, this, written in 1885, is significant:
"Perhaps it is bad taste on the writer's part, but the bugs and
reptiles in cotton attracted his attention even more than the cranes.
You see a Japanese tray covered with what appear to be dead and living
bugs and beetles,--some apparently about to fly away; others with
upturned abdomen, legs shrunk up, antennae inert. They are so life-like
that you may actually weigh one in your hand a moment before you find
that it is made of cotton. Everything, even to the joints of legs or
abdomen, is exquisitely imitated: the metallic lustre of the beetle's
armor is reproduced by a bronze varnish. There are cotton crickets with
the lustre of lacquer, and cotton grasshoppers of many colors: the
korogi, whose singing is like to the sound of a weaver, weaving rapidly
('ko-ro-ru, ko-ro-ru'), and the kirigisi, whose name is an imitation of
its own note."
Or again, remembering his masterly description of an ascent of the
famous Japanese mountain, read this, written long before he had ever
seen it in the reality: "Splendid silks were hanging up everywhere,
some exquisitely embroidered with attractive compositions, figures,
landscapes, and especially views of Fusiyama, the matchless mountain,
whose crater edges are shaped like the eight petals of the Sacred
Lotos; Fusiyama, of which the great artist Houkousai alone drew one
hundred different views; Fusiyama, whose snows may only be compared for
pearly beauty to 'the white teeth of a young girl,' and whose summit
magically changes its tints through the numberless variations of light.
Everywhere it appears,--the wonderful mountain,--on fans, behind rains
of gold, or athwart a furnace light of sunset, or against an immaculate
blue, or gold burnished by some wizard dawn; in bronze, exhaling from
its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke; on porcelain, towering
above stretches of vineyard and city-speckled plains, or perchance
begirdled by a rich cloud sash of silky, shifting tints, like some
beauty of Yosiwara."
At this period in his life there was not only a love of Creole
folk-lore and a longing for Japan, but a very decided and deep interest
in things Chinese. Not only was Hearn preparing himself for the writing
of "Some Chinese Ghosts," but it is altogether probable that his dreams
of a trip to Asia contemplated a sojourn in China as well as in Japan.
The daintiness, the fairy-like beauty of the Island Empire won him, and
China lost its chance for interpretation by a master. However, in his
letter of March 7, 1885, telling of "The East at New Orleans," we find
this relative to China:
"At either side of the main entrance is a great vase, carved from
lips to base with complex designs in partial relief and enamelled in
divers colors. In general effect of coloration the display is strictly
Chinese; the dominating tone is yellow,--bright yellow, the sacred and
cosmogonic color according to Chinese belief. When the Master of Heaven
deigns to write, He writes with yellow ink only, save when He takes
the lightning for His brush to trace a white sentence of destruction.
So at least we are told in the book called Kan-ing p'ien,--the 'Book
of Rewards and Punishments,' which further describes the writing of
God as being in _tchouen_,--those antique 'seal-characters' now rarely
seen except in jewel engraving, signatures stamped on works of art, or
inscriptions upon monuments,--those primitive ideographic characters
dating back perhaps to that age of which we have no historic record,
but of which Chinese architecture, with its strange peaks and curves,
offers us more than a suggestion,--the great Nomad Era."
There were only two more of Hearn's letters on the exposition, one
on March 14, on Mexico at New Orleans, telling of the wax figures,
depicting various Mexican types, and describing the feather-work,
imitated from that of the Aztecs; the other, appearing April 11, 1885,
telling of the government exhibit. On November 7 he wound up his
letters _for Harper's_ by telling something about "The Last of the
Voudoos,"--Jean Montanet, or Voudoo John, or Bayou John, who had just
died in New Orleans.
On March 28 and April 4 there appeared in _Harper's Bazar,_ some "Notes
of a Curiosity Hunter," in which he described some of the things that
interested him most in the Japanese and Mexican exhibits.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Letters from The Raven, by Lafcadio Hearn