WHEN, in 1889, Hearn appeared in my reception room, although I had not
seen any photograph of him, and had not even known of his coming, I at
once said, "You are Lafcadio?" The poor exotic was so sadly out of
place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that I am sure he would have
run out of the house if I had not at once shown him an overflowing
kindness, or if a tone of voice had betrayed any curiosity or doubt. It
was at once agreed that he should stay with me for awhile, and there was
no delay in providing him with a seat at my table and a room where he
could be at his work of proof-correcting. His "Two Years in the French
West Indies" was then going through the press, and an incident connected
with the proof-reading illustrates how impossible it was for him, except
when necessity drove, to meet any person not already known. He wished to
give his reader the tune of the songs printed on pages 426-431, but he
knew nothing of music. I arranged with a lady to repeat the airs on her
piano as he should whistle them, and then to write them on the
music-staff. When the fatal evening arrived, Hearn and I went to the
lady's house, but as we proceeded his part in our chatting lapsed into
silence, and he lagged behind. Although he finally dragged himself to
the foot of the doorstep, after I had rung the bell, his courage failed,
and before the door was opened I saw him running as if for life, half a
square away!
Even before this adventure I had learned that it was useless to try to
get him to lunch or dinner if any stranger were present. I think he
always listened to detect the possible presence of a stranger before
entering the dining-room, and he would certainly have starved rather
than submit to such an ordeal. It may be readily imagined that my
attempt to secure his services as a lecturer before a local literary
society was a ludricrous failure. He would have preferred hanging.
I allude to this attitude of his mind from no idle or curious reason,
but because it arose from logical and necessary reasons. When, later, he
was in Japan, I was once importuned, and should not have yielded, to
give a friend, who was about to visit Tokyo, a note of
introduction. As I warned my friend Hearn refused to see visitors.
That his extreme shyness depended upon his being unknown, and that it
was united to a lack of humour, may be gathered from the fact that, when
he came from Martinique, he wore a clothing which inevitably made the
passers-by turn and look and smile. Long and repeated endeavours were
necessary before I could get his consent to lay aside the outrageous
tropical hat for one that would not attract attention. How little he
recked of this appears from the tale I heard that a lot of street gamins
in Philadelphia formed a _queue_, the leader holding by Hearn's
coat-tails, and, as they marched, all kept step and sang in time,
"Where, where, where did you get that hat?"
At once, upon first meeting Hearn, I instinctively recognized that upon
my part the slightest sign of a desire or attempt to study him, to look
upon him as an object of literary or "natural" history, would
immediately put an end to our relations. Indeed, it never at that time
entered my mind to think thus of him, and only since collections of his
letters and biographies are threatened has it occurred to me to think
over our days and months together, and to help, so far as advisable,
toward a true understanding of the man and his art.
In 1889 Lafcadio was 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighed 137 pounds, and had a
chest girth of 36-3/4 inches.
The summer of 1889 made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character. I
suspect it was his first experience in anything that might be called
home-life. To his beloved _pays des revenants_, Martinique, his mind
constantly reverted, with an _Ahnung_ that he should never see it again.
There are truth and pathos and keen self-knowledge, frankly expressed
in the letters he would write me in the next room, immediately after we
had chatted long together, and when he felt that the pen could better
express what he shyly shrank from speaking:
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 wills, 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.
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 love much knowledge, but I
escape pains which, in spite of all your own knowledge, you
could wholly comprehend, for the simple reason that you
_can_ mingle with men.
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 Gooley at ---- St. That I
should cease to make a shadow some day seems quite natural,
because Hearney boy 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-putrefying sun,--and reach down
through old roots to the bones of me, and try to raise me
up....
The weakness and even exhaustion which the West Indian climate had
wrought in Hearn were painfully apparent. His stay in Philadelphia, warm
as that summer was to us, brought him speedily back to physical health.
The lesson was not unheeded, nor its implications, by his sensitive
mind.
I reproduce two photographs of Hearn: the first taken in 1888 (facing
page 61); and the second, by Mr. Gutekunst, at my urgent solicitation,
in 1889, while Hearn was stopping at my house (_Frontispiece_).
The first photograph, taken in Martinique, brings out the habitual
sadness and lack of vivacity in his physiognomy. In my picture of 1889
(the second) I was unable, despite all effort, to get Hearn to present
to the camera his entire face with naturally open eyes, and the
customary expression. He resolutely refused, and consented to the
compromise of a two-thirds view _with closed eyes_. And this to me is
still the most truthful and hence the most expressive of all his
photographs. It is so suggestive because of its negations, so expressive
because non-expressive. But it indicates, silently and by inference, the
most significant fact about the man.
To those who are expert in such things, the stare of the highly myopic
eye is known to be not that of mental action and seeing, but of not
seeing. When we walk, we are forward-looking beings, and what goes on
within the eye or brain and what may be behind us is totally ignored.
But for a highly myopic person there is no outward or forward looking.
Hearn's closed eye gives, therefore, a decidedly more truthful lesson in
physiognomy than does the open and protruding one, which cannot see the
coming or future scene, or which sees it so vaguely that its hint of the
scene is perhaps more useless than the imagined picture of the totally
blind. His inability to see the presenting world had resulted in a
renunciation of outlook and an absolute incuriosity as to the future.
With weaklings this might have brought about introspection, the mental
eye--the product of the physical eye--turned in upon itself. Hearn was
too much of an artist to fall into that Death Valley of all aesthetics,
and there was a quick acceptance of the logical and inevitable, whence
arose the wonder of poetic retrospection.