Produced by David Clarke, Ernest Schaal, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
CONCERNING LAFCADIO HEARN
[Illustration: LAFCADIO HEARN.
_From a Photograph by Gutekunst, 1889._]
_Frontispiece._
CONCERNING LAFCADIO
HEARN. By GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D.
WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY
BY LAURA STEDMAN
_WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS_
T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
1908
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. HEREDITY AND THE EARLY LIFE 1
II. IN PERSON 7
III. THE PERIOD OF THE GRUESOME 13
IV. THE NEW ORLEANS TIME 33
V. AT MARTINIQUE 57
VI. "GETTING A SOUL" 65
VII. "IN GHOSTLY JAPAN" 81
VIII. AS A POET 93
IX. THE POET OF MYOPIA 103
X. HEARN'S STYLE 119
XI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 137
XII. APPRECIATIONS AND EPITOMES 143
BIBLIOGRAPHY 247
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_To face page_
LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY GUTEKUNST
IN 1889 _Frontispiece_
HEARN AT ABOUT THE AGE OF EIGHT, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH 5
REDUCED FIRST PAGE OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF "YE
GIGLAMPZ" 21
LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT MARTINIQUE,
AUGUST 24, 1888 61
HANDWRITING OF HEARN IN 1889 68
PREFACE
THERE are as many possible biographies of a man as there are possible
biographers--and one more! Of Lafcadio Hearn there has been, and there
will be, no excuse for any biography whatever. A properly edited volume
of his letters, and, perhaps, a critical estimate of the methods and
development of his imaginative power and literary character are, and
still remain, most desirable. That some competent hand may yet be found
to undertake this task is still hoped by those who recognize the value
of a man's best work. To furnish material and help toward this end is my
object in collecting the following pages. The life of a literary man
interests and is of value to the world because of the literature he has
created. Without a bibliography, without even mention of the works he
wrote, his biography would be useless. To correct many untrue and
misleading statements and inferences of a serious nature that have been
published concerning him and his life, should it ever be undertaken,
will prove a labour so difficult and thankless that it will scarcely be
entered upon by one who would do it rightly. That it will not be
hazarded comes, as I have said, from the fact that it is not needed,
because neither Hearn himself, nor his real friends, nor again, a
discriminating literary sense, have been, nor can be, under any illusion
as to his "greatness." He has been spoken of as "a great man," which, of
course, he was not. Two talents he had, but these were far from
constituting personal greatness. Deprived by nature, by the necessities
of his life, or by conscious intention, of religion, morality,
scholarship, magnanimity, loyalty, character, benevolence, and other
constituents of personal greatness, it is more than folly to endeavour
to place him thus wrongly before the world.
The irony of the situation is pathetically heightened by the fact that,
supposing him to be very great, "the weaknesses of very great men,"
which he said should not be spoken of, are amazingly paraded in the
letters. Had he ever dreamed that his letters would be published, he
would not, and could not, have so unblushingly exposed himself and his
faults to the public gaze. The fact has now been writ exceeding large,
or it would not be, and should not be, corrected and contradicted. A
word to the wise suffices.
There remains the question, truly pertinent, concerning the nature and
progress toward perfection of his imagination, and of his literary
execution.
We know nothing, and doubtless we may never know anything definite,
accurate and of value about the character either of his father or of his
mother. Any attempt, therefore, to estimate what effect heredity had in
handing down the strange endowment we find in his early manhood is
wholly futile. We may not be too sure concerning either the parentage or
nationality ascribed to him.
Moreover, in the last analysis, Hearn was no "product of his
environment." In a certain sense, he was of the school of Flaubert,
Gautier, Maupassant, Loti, and Zola, but with such differences and
variations that these teachers may not take much credit or flattery to
themselves. The great, the distinctive, the dominating force which
controlled and created Hearn's literary makings, his morbid vision, was
not "environment" as the critics and scientists mean by the term. These
have not yet learned that Art and Life hang upon the perfection and
peculiarities of the senses of the artist and of the one who lives, and
that intellect and especially aesthetics are almost wholly the product of
vision. Conversely, the morbidities and individualisms of Art and Life
often depend pre-eminently upon the morbidities of vision.
Character, lastly, is the action or reaction of personality against
circumstance, not under and dominated by circumstance. To have character
is to control circumstance; Hearn was always its slave. Except in one
particular, the pursuit of literary excellence, Hearn had no character
whatever. His was the most unresisting, most echolike mind I have ever
known. He was a perfect chameleon; he took for the time the colour of
his surroundings. He was always the mirror of the friend of the instant,
or if no friend was there, of the dream of that instant. The next minute
he was another being, acted upon by the new circumstance, reflecting the
new friend, or redreaming the old and new-found dream. They who blame
him too sharply for his disloyalty and ingratitude to old friends do not
understand him psychologically. There was nothing behind the physical
and neurologic machine to be loyal or disloyal. He had no mind, or
character, to be possessed of loyalty or disloyalty. For the most part,
he simply dropped his friends, and rarely spoke ill of them or of his
enemies. There was nothing whatever in him, except perhaps for the short
time when he said his friend had given him a soul, to take the cast and
function of loyalty or disloyalty, gratitude or ingratitude. One does
not ask originality or even great consistency of an echo, and, of all
men that have ever lived, Hearn, mentally and spiritually, was most
perfectly an echo. The sole quality, the only originality, he brought to
the fact, or to the echo, was colour--a peculiar derivation of a maimed
sense. He created or invented nothing; his stories were always told him
by others; at first they were gruesome tales even to horror and disgust.
He learned by practice to choose lovelier stories, ones always distant,
sometimes infinitely distant, and he learned to retell or echo them with
more artistic skill and even a matchless grace. His merit, almost his
sole merit, and his unique skill lay in the strange faculty of colouring
the echo with the hues and tints of heavenly rainbows and unearthly
sunsets, all gleaming with a ghostly light that never was on sea or
shore. So that, fused as he was with his work, he himself became that
impossible thing, a chromatic voice, a multicoloured echo.
We must, therefore, accept the facts as we find them, the young man as
we find him, uneducated, friendless, without formed character, with a
lot of heathenish and unrestrained appetites, crippled as to the most
important of the senses, poverty-stricken, improvident, of peculiar and
unprepossessing appearance and manners, flung into an alien world in
many ways more morbid than himself. That he lived at all is almost
astonishing, and that he writhed out, how he did it, and the means
whereby he finally presented to the best artistic and literary
intellects of the world prized values and enjoyments, is indeed worthy
of some attention and study.
From letters written to me just prior to his death by that veteran and
discriminating critic, Mr. Edmund C. Stedman, I quote a few sentences to
show that the appreciation of Hearn has by no means reached its full
measure:
"I passed an evening with your Hearn manuscript and the supplementary
matter by my granddaughter, and found them both well done and of deep
interest. Some of your passages are beautifully written and make me
think that if you will give us more of the style which is so plainly at
your command, you will gain, etc.... The publishers do not understand,
as I do, that Hearn will in time be as much of a romantic personality
and tradition as Poe now is. I strongly urged one publisher to buy those
copyrights owned by three other firms on any terms and in the end bring
out a definitive edition of his complete works."
As to Miss Stedman's workmanlike bibliography, it should be said that
the rule which has been followed in excluding less valuable reviews and
notices, was based upon the effort to include doubtful ones only when of
exceptional value, by a personal friend of Hearn, etc. Files of ordinary
newspapers are not preserved even in local libraries, and, therefore,
references to them have been excluded except under peculiar
circumstances of authorship, opinions stated, etc.
For their kind permission to make extracts from Hearn's published works,
grateful acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Little, Brown and Company,
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper Brothers, and The Macmillan
Company.
Should this volume bring in more money than the necessary expenses of
compiling it, the excess will be sent to Mrs. Hearn through the Japanese
Consul, or in some other way.
GEORGE M. GOULD.
CHAPTER I.--HEREDITY AND THE
EARLY LIFE
[Illustration: HEARN AT ABOUT THE AGE OF EIGHT.
_From a Photograph._]
_To face page 1._
MANY conflicting accounts have been given concerning Hearn's parents and
childhood. From his own statements made in 1889, the notes of which,
taken down at the moment, are before me, he was born on June 27, 1850,
at Leucadia, in Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Islands. His father, he
said, was an Irishman, Charles Bush Hearn, Surgeon-Major in the 76th
English Infantry Regiment, which had been stationed at Madras, Calcutta.
The regiment was later merged into the 22nd West Riding Battalion. His
mother was a Greek from Cerigo, another of the Ionian Isles; her name he
had forgotten. He spoke of his father and mother as having been married,
and of a subsequent divorce, about 1857 or 1858. Allusion was made to a
younger brother, named Daniel, who was brought up by an artist, a
painter, Richard Hearn, a brother of Charles Bush Hearn, who lived in
Paris.[1] Hearn thought this brother was educated as a civil engineer.
After the divorce his mother remarried, her second husband being a
lawyer, a Greek, name unknown, and living at Smyrna, Asia Minor.
Lafcadio's father also remarried, taking his wife to India. Three
daughters were said to have been born there. Lafcadio was put under the
care of his aunt, Mrs. Sarah Brenane, of Dublin, No. 73 Upper Leeson
Street. She was a widow without children. In a letter to me, written
prior to 1889, Hearn says: "As for me, I have a good deal in me _not_ to
thank my ancestors for; and it is a pleasure that _I cannot_, even if I
would, trace myself two generations back, not even one generation on my
mother's side. Half these Greeks are mixed with Turks and Arabs--don't
know how much of an Oriental mixture I have, or may have." And again, "I
do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead. My father
died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history
of my mother's marriage." He told me later that this romance was said to
have been that Surgeon-Major Hearn was once set upon by the brothers of
the young Greek woman to whom he was paying attention, and that he was
left supposedly dead, with about a score of dagger-made wounds in his
body.
[1] In _The Bookbuyer_, May, 1896, Hearn's friend, Mr. J. S.
Tunison, speaks of the existence of a brother, "a busy
farmer in Northwestern Ohio."
In the Dayton, Ohio, _Journal_, of December 25, 1906, Mr. Tunison speaks
authoritatively of the discrepant accounts given by many writers, and by
Hearn himself, concerning his parents, birth and early years. "Hearn
himself had misgivings, and sometimes associated his baptismal name with
the not uncommon Spanish name, Leocadie." The boy, of course, could only
repeat what he had been told by his relatives or friends. Physiognomy
can help little perhaps, but here its testimony is assuredly not
confirmatory of the more common story. Any attempt to secure definite
information in Ireland would scarcely be successful. One possibility
remained: There is still living an Irish gentleman to whom Lafcadio was
sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the
boy was placed. I have not the right to mention his name. He was living
in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870, and through his brother-in-law in Ireland,
Lafcadio was, as it were, consigned to my informant. The subject is an
unpleasant one to him, and he answered my questions with reluctance. He
did not like the boy and did not feel that he had any obligation toward
him; in fact, he did not feel that he was in any way responsible for his
care. Besides, he had heavy duties toward his own children that absorbed
all his energies. "I never had a letter from him. He came to the house
three times. Mrs. Brenane sent me money, which I gave to him to pay his
bills with. When he got work, he never came near me again." He was not
sure that Mrs. Brenane was, in truth, Hearn's aunt, and upon being
pressed, answered repeatedly, "I know nothing, nobody knows anything
true of Hearn's life. He may have been related to my wife's family, but
I never knew." Asked why the lad was "shipped" to him, he replied, "I do
not know." Inquiries concerning the boy's schooling brought no more
than, "I only know that he could never stay long in one school." "His
father was Irish, was he not?" "Yes." "And his mother was Greek?" "O
yes, I suppose so," but with an indefinite inflection.
The mystery, therefore, of Hearn's parentage and boyhood years is
probably not to be cleared up. He was, perhaps, a "bad boy," and
expelled from several schools; his lifelong hatred and fear of Catholics
and Jesuits doubtless dates from these youthful and irrational
experiences; but it is useless to inquire whether or not they were in
any sense justifiable. A little reflected light is thrown upon this
period by an apocryphal anecdote in a letter to me, written while Hearn
was at my house, and which Miss Bisland in her "Life and Letters" kindly
failed to put in its proper place,[2] as well as omitted to say whence
she obtained it:
[2] Vol. I, pp. 459-460, just prior to the last
paragraph.
This again reminds me of something. When I was a boy, I had
to go to confession, and my confessions were honest ones.
One day I told the ghostly father that I had been guilty of
desiring that the devil would come to me in the shape of
the beautiful woman in which he came to the Anchorites in
the desert, and that I thought that I would yield to such
temptations. He was a grim man who rarely showed emotion,
my confessor, but on that occasion he actually rose to his
feet in anger.
"Let me warn you!" he cried, "let me warn you! Of all things
never wish that! You might be more sorry for it than you can
possibly believe!"
His earnestness filled me with fearful joy;--for I thought
the temptation might actually be realized--so serious he
looked ... but the pretty _succubi_ all continued to remain
in hell.
The necessary inference, therefore, is that the lad was an unwelcome
charge upon those Irish relations or friends of his father, in whose
care he was placed. It is said that he always spoke with bitterness of
his father, and with love of his mother. Beyond a certain amount of
money allotted (by his father?) for his support, neither parent was
evidently concerned about his upbringing and welfare, and all who should
have been interested in those things made haste to rid themselves of the
obligations. If the stories of his boyish "badness" were true, the lad
could not be blamed for putting into practice his inherited instincts,
so that the pathos of his early misfortunes only increase our sympathy
for the youth and his tragedies. (I reproduce a photograph of Lafcadio
and his aunt, Mrs. Justin, or Sarah, Brenane. The lad must have been at
the time about eight years of age.) The "consignment" of the
nineteen-year old youth to the distant relative of the family, who was
then living in Cincinnati, explains the reason why, landing in New York,
he finally went to Cincinnati. How long he lived in New York City and
any details of his life there before he went West, may be held as beyond
investigation. Mr. Tunison incidentally speaks of him during this time
as "sleeping in dry-goods boxes on the street, etc.," and I have heard
that he acted as a restaurant waiter. There have been published stories
of a period of want and suffering endured in London before the
emigration to New York City. Others concerning great scholarship and the
intimate knowledge of several languages, especially French, are surely
not true. Even in 1889, after the New Orleans and Martinique periods,
Hearn could not speak French with ease or correctness. In Cincinnati he
secured the help of a French scholar in translating Gautier's "Emaux et
Camees." His want of knowledge of the Latin language is deplored in his
letters and, to the last, after a dozen or more years in Japan, his
inability to read a Japanese newspaper or speak the language was a
source of regret to himself, of errors too numerous to mention, and of
grievous limitations in his work as an interpreter. In the one field of
which his taste, aptitude and function dictated a wide and stimulating
acquaintance, folk-lore, he was lamentably wanting. It might seem
unfitting to allude to this were it not well to be discriminating in all
cases, and had not Hearn sought to reach authoritativeness in a
department wherein he had not gathered the fundamental data.