I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked
upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a
day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless
son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it
to a morbid degree. Any place rather than Cincinnati would have been
better for the happiness and success of the emigrating boy, but his
relatives had ridded themselves of the burden by assenting to his wish.
Excepting that to Japan, the only sensible move he made was from
Cincinnati toward the tropics, to the half-way house thither--New
Orleans. The desire to seek the _au dela_ was present, his friends tell
me, throughout the stay in Cincinnati. Perhaps the single city in the
world which would satisfy his dream more nearly than could any other,
was New Orleans. Being psychologically for the most part of degenerate
Latin stock, and especially of the French variety, with the requisite
admixture of exotic and tropical barbarism; bathed, but not cooked, in
the hot and brilliant sunshine he loved and hated; touched and energized
by too little Teutonic blood and influence, New Orleans offered to the
unhappy man the best possible surroundings for the growth of his
talents. Adding to this fortunate concensus of circumstance and partly a
corollary of it was the most fortunate of all accidents that could have
occurred to him--that is, the existence of a daily newspaper such as the
_Times-Democrat_; of a paying mass of subscribers relishing Hearn's
translations from the most artistic French writers of the short-story;
and, most important of all, the presence on the bridge of the noble
Captain of the Newspaper enterprise, the veteran editor, Mr. Page M.
Baker. One shudders to think what would have been Hearn's later career
had it not been for the guidance and help of this wise, sympathetic and
magnanimous friend. For the one thing needed by Hearn in those who would
be his friends rather than their own was magnanimity. It was his
frequent misfortune in life to come under the influence of those as
incapable of true unselfishness and real kindness as it was natural for
them to be cunning and to use an assumed friendship for hidden
flatteries and purposes of their own. Most of these would not have
dreamed of associating with the man for any reason other than to stand
in the reflected light of his literary fame. Most of them had as little
care for his poetic prose, and as little appreciation or knowledge of
good literature as they had of "the enclitic _de_." They had no
magnanimity, only wile instead of it. As Hearn was also deprived of
large-mindedness in all affairs of the world, he was unhappily prone to
accept the offered bribe. He wanted above all things to be flattered and
to do as his imperious impulses and weak will suggested. Any one who
recognized these things in him and seconded the follies, remained his
permitted "friend," but those who withstood them in the least and ran
counter to his morbid trends and resolves--these were speedily
"dropped," and insulted or grieved to silence. If they had magnanimity,
they bore with the man in pity and answered his insults with kind words
and kinder deeds. They recognized that they were responsible not to the
man but to the carrier of a great talent, and although they might not
forget, they gladly forgave, if possibly they might speed him on his
predestined way.
Of this number was Baker. Directly or indirectly through him, came a
long and happy period of life; came the congenial, educating work,
without slavery, of the translations and other easy reportorial
services. Of equal importance were the financial rewards. Before and
after the New Orleans time not the least of Hearn's misfortunes was his
intolerable and brutalizing improvidence and impecuniousness. Under
Baker's friendship he came to what for such a person was affluence and
independence. He found leisure to read and study and think outside of
the journalistic pale, and better still, perhaps,--better to his
thinking, at least--he secured the means to indulge his life-long desire
for curious and out-of-the-way books. During this time it grew to
consciousness with him that in everything, except as regards his beloved
Art, he had a little learned to recognize the worth of money.
But within him grew ever stronger the plague of the unsatisfied, the
sting of unrest, and he was compelled to obey. In a letter to me from
Martinique, after he had recognized his mistake, he admits and explains
as follows:
I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and
English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural
already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to
continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure
that I should find it difficult to write English. The
resources of the intellectual life are all lacking
here,--no libraries, no books in any language;--a mind
accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long
uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their
primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough
growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature
does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or
to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle
touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for
months.
But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her
more and more daily,--that you gradually cease to wish to do
aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you
begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse
that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a
while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature
succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and
purpose are foolish things,--that life is very sweet without
them;--and you actually find yourself ready to confess that
the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for
life in the North are all madness,--that they wasted years
which might have been delightfully dozed away in a land
where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of
sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a
green parrot.
I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears
to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great
city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return
to the States for a while,--a short while, probably;--but I
do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become
tired of places,--or at least of the disagreeable facts
attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and
more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that
ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can
comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a
place,--the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and
the tint of its sky;--and how small irritations become
colossal and crushing by years of repetition;--yet perhaps
you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole
system of life, of civilization, even with very limited
experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,--an
unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of
existence in a highly organized society. The higher the
social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this
especially in America,--in the nervous centres of the
world's activity. One feels it least, I imagine, in the
tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one
has no force left for the effort to expand one's own
individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive
that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to
do:--To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the
fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon
necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a
certain position here;--to keep it requires means. I can
earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more,
I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to
live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the
means for it in very short order.
I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went
to Demerara and visited the lesser West Indies in July and
August of last year,--returned to New York after three
months with some MS.,--sold it,--felt very unhappy at the
idea of staying in New York, where I had good
offers,--suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics
by the same steamer that had brought me. I had no
commission, resolved to trust to magazine-work. So far I
have just been able to scrape along;--the climate numbs
mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for won't come.
The real--surpassing imagination--whelms the ideal out of
sight and hearing. The world is young here,--not old and
wise and grey as in the North; and one must not seek the
Holy Ghost in it. I suspect that the material furnished by
the tropics can only be utilized in a Northern atmosphere.
We will talk about it together.
That he never thought to return to New Orleans is demonstrated by the
fact that when he left, he shipped his books to another good friend and
great editor, Mr. Alden, to keep for him. When he came to the United
States in 1889, he fully intended returning to some tropical land. But
it was otherwise ordered, and most fortunately, for a year or two more
of life under such conditions would have killed both mind and body.
Upon Hearn's arrival in New Orleans, he began sending a series of
charming letters to the Cincinnati _Commercial_, signed "Ozias
Midwinter."[11] They are, indeed, exquisite, and as certainly of a
delicacy and beauty which must have made the reader of that time and
newspaper wonder what strange sort of a correspondent the editor had
secured. The first letter was about Memphis, passed on his way South. I
cite some parts to show how the gruesome was merging into or being
supplanted by something larger and better, and also to illustrate
Hearn's growing interest in colours.
[11] Kindly secured by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, Ohio,
from a friend and lent to me.
The stranger, however, is apt to leave Memphis with one
charming recollection of the place--the remembrance of the
sunset scene from the bluffs across the river over
Arkansas. I do not think that any part of the world can
offer a more unspeakably beautiful spectacle to the
traveller than what he may witness any fair evening from
those rugged old bluffs at Memphis. The first time I saw it
the day had been perfectly bright and clear,--the blue of
the sky was unclouded by the least fleecy stain of white
cloud; and the sun descended in the west,--not in a yellow
haze, or a crimson fog, but with the splendour of his fiery
glory almost undimmed. He seemed to leave no trace of his
bright fires behind him; and the sky-blue began to darken
into night-purple from the east almost immediately. I
thought at first it was one of the least romantic sunsets I
had ever seen. It was not until the stars were out, and the
night had actually fallen, that I beheld the imperial
magnificence of that sunset.
* * * * *
I once thought, when sailing up the Ohio one bright Northern
summer, that the world held nothing more beautiful than the
scenery of the Beautiful River--those voluptuous hills with
their sweet feminine curves, the elfin gold of that summer
haze, and the pale emerald of the river's verdure-reflecting
breast. But even the loveliness of the Ohio seemed faded,
and the Northern sky-blue palely cold, like the tint of
iceberg pinnacles, when I beheld for the first time the
splendour of the Mississippi.
"You must come on deck early to-morrow," said the kind
Captain of the _Thompson Dean_; "we are entering the Sugar
Country."
So I saw the sun rise over the cane-fields of Louisiana.
It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its
setting at Memphis, but of another colour;--an auroral flush
of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of
cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened
half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed
tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting
against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests
of cocoanut palms. Then the day broke gently and slowly--a
day too vast for a rapid dawn--a day that seemed deep as
Space. I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a
vaulted church-roof beside that sky--a sky so softly
beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made
one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite.
And the giant river broadened to a mile--smooth as a mirror,
still and profound as a mountain lake. Between the vastness
of the sky and the vastness of the stream, we seemed moving
suspended in the midst of day, with only a long, narrow
tongue of land on either side breaking the brightness. Yet
the horizon never became wholly blue. The green-golden glow
lived there all through the day; it was brightest in the
south. It was so tropical, that glow;--it seemed of the
Pacific, a glow that forms a background to the sight of
lagoons and coral reefs and "lands where it is always
afternoon."
Below this glow gleamed another golden green, the glory of
the waving cane-fields beyond the trees. Huge sugar-mills
were breathing white and black clouds into the sky, as they
masticated their mighty meal; and the smell of saccharine
sweetness floated to us from either shore. Then we glided by
miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls;
and by the mouths of broad bayous;--past swamps dark with
cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey
Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient
trees;--past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and
cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the
landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed
tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot
through with gold. The magnificent old mansions of the
Southern planters, built after a generous fashion unknown in
the North, with broad verandas and deliciously cool porches,
and all painted white or perhaps a pale yellow, looked out
grandly across the water from the hearts of shadowy groves;
and, like villages of a hundred cottages, the negro quarters
dotted the verdant face of the plantation with far-gleaming
points of snowy whiteness.
And still that wondrous glow brightened in the south, like a
far-off reflection of sunlight on the Spanish Main.
"But it does not look now as it used to in the old slave
days," said the pilot, as he turned the great wheel. "The
swamps were drained, and the plantations were not overgrown
with cottonwood; and somehow or other the banks usen't to
cave in then as they do now."
I saw indeed signs of sad ruin on the face of the great
plantations; there were splendid houses crumbling to decay,
and whole towns of tenantless cabins; estates of immense
extent were lying almost unfilled, or with only a few acres
under cultivation; and the vigorous cottonwood trees had
shot up in whole forests over fields once made fertile by
the labour of ten thousand slaves. The scene was not without
its melancholy; it seemed tinged by the reflection of a
glory passed away--the glory of wealth, and the magnificence
of wealth; of riches and the luxury of riches.
O fair paradise of the South, if still so lovely in thy
ruin, what must thou have been in the great day of thy
greatest glory!
White steamboats, heavily panting under their loads of
cotton, came toiling by, and called out to us wild greeting
long and shrill, until the pilot opened the lips of our
giant boat, and her mighty challenge awoke a thousand
phantom voices along the winding shore. Red sank the sun in
a sea of fire, and bronze-hued clouds piled up against the
light, like fairy islands in a sea of glory, such as were
seen, perhaps, by the Adelantado of the Seven Cities.
"Those are not real clouds," said the pilot, turning to the
west, his face aglow with the yellow light. "Those are only
smoke clouds rising from the sugar mills of Louisiana, and
drifting with the evening wind."
The daylight died 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.
The letters descriptive of New Orleans scenes and life deserve
republishing had I space for them here. In a brief paragraph, a
sentence perhaps, almost in a word, is given the photograph, chromatic
and vitalized in Hearn's unrivalled picturesque style, of the levees,
the shipping, the sugar-landing, the cotton-shipping, the ocean
steamers, the strange mixture of peoples from all countries and climes;
the architecture, streets, markets, etc. The Vendetta of the Sicilian
immigrants is described with a strength and vividness which bear
eloquent witness to Hearn's innate pleasure in such themes. There is
also shown his beginning the study of Creole character, grammar, and
language. A peculiarly striking picture is painted of the new huge
cotton-press, as a monster whose jaws open with a low roar to devour the
immense bale of cotton and to crush it to a few inches of thickness. I
cannot exclude this excerpt:
Do you remember that charming little story, "Pere Antoine's
Date-Palm," written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published
in the same volume with "Marjorie Daw" and other tales?
Pere Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and
died in New Orleans. As a boy, he conceived a strong
friendship for a fellow student of about his own age, who,
in after years, sailed to some tropical island in the
Southern Seas, and wedded some darkly beautiful woman,
graceful and shapely and tall as a feathery palm. Pere
Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friendship
strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The
young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also passed from
the world; but they left a little daughter for some one to
take care of.
The good priest, of course, took care of her, and brought
her up at New Orleans. And she grew up graceful and comely
as her mother, with all the wild beauty of the South. But
the child could not forget the glory of the tropics, the
bright lagoon, the white-crested sea roaring over the coral
reef, the royal green of the waving palms, and the beauty of
the golden-feathered birds that chattered among them.
So she pined for the tall palms and the bright sea and the
wild reef, until there came upon her that strange
homesickness which is death; and still dreaming of the
beautiful palms, she gradually passed into that great sleep
which is dreamless. And she was buried by Pere Antoine near
his own home.
By and by, above the little mound there suddenly came a
gleam of green; and mysteriously, slowly, beautifully,
there grew up towering in tropical grace above the grave, a
princely palm. And the old priest knew that it had grown
from the heart of the dead child.
So the years passed by, and the roaring city grew up about
the priest's home and the palm-tree, trying to push Pere
Antoine off his land. But he would not be moved. They piled
up gold upon his doorsteps and he laughed at them; they went
to law with him and he beat them all; and, at last, dying,
he passed away true to his trust; for the man who cuts down
that palm-tree loses the land that it grows upon.
"And there it stands," says the Poet, "in the narrow, dingy
street, a beautiful dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign
lady, whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose
breath makes the air enamoured. May the hand wither that
touches her ungently!"
Now I was desirous above all things to visit the palm made
famous by this charming legend, and I spent several days in
seeking it. I visited the neighbourhood of the old Place
d'Armes--now Jackson Square--and could find no trace of it;
then I visited the southern quarter of the city, with its
numberless gardens, and I sought for the palm among groves
of orange-trees overloaded with their golden fruit, amid
broad-leaved bananas, and dark cypresses, and fragrant
magnolias and tropical trees of which I did not know the
names. Then I found many date-palms. Some were quite young,
with their splendid crest of leafy plumes scarcely two feet
above the ground; others stood up to a height of thirty or
forty feet. Whenever I saw a tall palm, I rang the doorbell
and asked if that were Pere Antoine's date-palm. Alas!
nobody had ever heard of the Pere Antoine.
Then I visited the ancient cathedral, founded by the pious
Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor of New Orleans, one hundred
and fifty years ago; and I asked the old French priest
whether they had ever heard of the Pere Antoine. And they
answered me that they knew him not, after having searched
the ancient archives of the ancient Spanish Cathedral.
Once I found a magnificent palm, loaded with dates, in a
garden on St. Charles Street, so graceful that I felt the
full beauty of Solomon's simile as I had never felt it
before: "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree." I rang the
bell and made inquiry concerning the age of the tree. It was
but twenty years old; and I went forth discouraged.
At last, to my exceeding joy, I found an informant in the
person of a good-natured old gentleman, who keeps a quaint
bookstore in Commercial Place. The tree was indeed growing,
he said, in New Orleans Street, near the French Cathedral,
and not far from Congo Square; but there were many legends
concerning it. Some said it had been planted over the grave
of some Turk or Moor--perhaps a fierce corsair from Algiers
or Tunis--who died while sailing up the Mississippi, and was
buried on its moist shores. But it was not at all like the
other palm-trees in the city, nor did it seem to him to be a
date-palm. It was a real Oriental palm; yea, in sooth, such
a palm as Solomon spake of in his Love-song of Love-songs.
"I said, I will go up to the palm-tree; I will take hold of
the boughs thereof." ...
I found it standing in beautiful loneliness in the centre of
a dingy woodshed on the north side of New Orleans Street,
towering about forty feet above the rickety plank fence of
the yard. The gateway was open, and a sign swung above it
bearing the name, "M. Michel." I walked in and went up to
the palm-tree. A labourer was sawing wood in the back-shed,
and I saw through the windows of the little cottage by the
gate a family at dinner. I knocked at the cottage-door, and
a beautiful Creole woman opened it.
"May I ask, Madame, whether this palm-tree was truly planted
by the Pere Antoine?"
"Ah, Monsieur, there are many droll stories which they
relate of that tree. There are folks who say that a young
girl was interred there, and it is also said that a Sultan
was buried under that tree--or the son of a Sultan. And
there are also some who say that a priest planted it."
"Was it the Pere Antoine, Madame?"
"I do not know, Monsieur. There are people also who say that
it was planted here by Indians from Florida. But I do not
know whether such trees grow in Florida. I have never seen
any other palm-tree like it. It is not a date-palm. It
flowers every year, with a beautiful yellow blossom the
colour of straw, and the blossoms hang down in pretty
curves. Oh, it is very graceful! Sometimes it bears fruit, a
kind of oily fruit, but not dates. I am told that they make
oil from the fruit of such palms."
I thought it looked so sad, that beautiful tree in the dusty
woodyard, with no living green thing near it. As its bright
verdant leaves waved against the blue above, one could not
but pity it as one would pity some being, fair and feminine
and friendless in a strange land. "_Oh, c'est bien
gracieux_," murmured the handsome Creole lady.
"Is it true, Madame, that the owner of the land loses it if
he cuts down the tree?"
"_Mais oui!_ But the proprietors of the ground have always
respected the tree, because it is so old, so very old!"
Then I found the proprietor of the land, and he told me that
when the French troops first arrived in this part of the
country they noticed that tree. "Why," I exclaimed, "that
must have been in the reign of Louis XIV!" "It was in 1679,
I believe," he answered. As for the Pere Antoine, he had
never heard of him. Neither had he heard of Thomas Bailey
Aldrich. So that I departed, mourning for my dead faith in a
romance which was beautiful.
Next to his best Japanese studies, I suspect it will finally come to
recognition that Hearn's greatest service to literature is his
magnificent series of translations during the New Orleans years. As a
translator there were given him his data by creative minds. His own
mental equipment prevented creation, and his clearly set limits as a
translator added power to his ability and function as a colourist and
word-artist. His was almost a unique expertness of entering into the
spirit of his models, refeeling their emotions, reimagining their
thought and art, and reclothing it with the often somewhat hard and
stiff material of English weaving. All of their spirit philologically
possible to be conveyed to us, we may be sure he re-presents. For his
was the rare power of the instant, the iridescent, the winged word. I
think it was innate and spontaneous with him, a gift of the inscrutable,
illogic, and fantastically generous-niggard Fates. All his studies and
conscious efforts were almost unavailing either to hinder or to further
its perfection. If to Fate we may not be grateful, we can at least thank
the weird lesser gods of life for the mysterious wonder of the gift. The
wealth of loving labour silently offered in the 187 or more translations
published in the _Times-Democrat_ is marvellous. Hearn brought to my
house the loose cuttings from the files, and we got them into some order
in "scrapbooks." But the dates of publication and other details are
often characteristically wanting. Elsewhere in the present volume the
titles, etc., of the stories are listed. Preceded by those of "One of
Cleopatra's Nights," they form a body of literary values which should be
rescued from the newspaper files and permanently issued in book-form for
the pleasure and instruction of English readers. To do this I have most
generously been given permission by Hearn's ever helpful and
discriminating friend, Mr. Page M. Baker, editor of the
_Times-Democrat_.
Hearn knew well the difficulties of the translator's art. "One who
translates for the love of the original will probably have no reward
save the satisfaction of creating something beautiful and perhaps of
saving a masterpiece from less reverent hands." So anxious was he to do
such work that he was willing to pay the publication expenses. As
pertinent, I copy an editorial of his on the subject, which was
published in the _Times-Democrat_, during the period in which he was so
busy as a translator:
The New York _Nation_ has been publishing in its columns a
number of interesting and severe criticisms upon
translations from foreign authors. These translations are
generally condemned, and with good specifications of
reasons,--notwithstanding the fact that some of them have
been executed by persons who have obtained quite a popular
reputation as translators. One critic dwells very strongly
upon the most remarkable weakness of all the renderings in
question;--they invariably fail to convey the colour and
grace of the original, even when the meaning is otherwise
preserved. Speaking of the translators themselves, the
reviewer observes: "There is not one _artist_ among them."
All this is very true; but the writer does not explain the
causes of this state of affairs. They are many, no
doubt;--the principal fact for consideration being that
there is no demand for artistic work in translation. And
there is no demand for it, not so much because it is rare
and unlikely to be appreciated as because it is dear.
Artistic translators cannot afford to work for a
song,--neither would they attempt to translate a
five-hundred-page novel in three weeks or a month as others
do. Again, artistic translators would not care to attach
their names to the published translation of a fourth-or
fifth-class popular novel. Finally, artistic translations do
not obtain a ready market with first-class American
publishers, who, indeed, seldom touch domestic translations
of foreign fiction, and depend for their translations of
European literature upon transatlantic enterprise. Thus the
artistic translator may be said to have no field. He may
sell his work to some petty publisher, perhaps, but only at
a price that were almost absurd to mention;--and the
first-class publishers do not care to speculate in American
translations at all. We might also add that the
translator's task is always a thankless one,--that however
superb and laborious his execution, it can never obtain much
public notice, nor even so much as public comprehension. The
original author will be admired,--the translator unnoticed,
except by a few critics.
Moreover, the men capable of making the most artistic
translations are usually better employed. The translator of
a great French, German, or Italian masterpiece of style,
ought, in the eternal fitness of things, to be a man able to
write something very artistic in his own tongue. No one
seems to doubt that Longfellow was the man to translate
Dante,--that Tennyson could parallel Homer (as he has shown
by a wonderful effort) in the nineteenth-century
English,--that Carlyle re-created Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister"
by his rendering of it,--that Austin Dobson was the first to
teach English readers some of the beauties of Gautier's
poetry,--that Swinburne alone could have made Francois
Villon adopt an English garb which exactly fitted him. But
the same readers perhaps never gave a thought to the fact
that the works of Flaubert, of Daudet, of Droz, of Hugo, of
at least a score of other European writers, call for work of
an almost equally high class on the part of the translator,
and never receive it! What a translation of Daudet could not
Henry James give us!--how admirably John Addington Symonds
could reproduce for us the Venetian richness of Paul de
Saint Victor's style! But such men are not likely to be
invited, on either side of the Atlantic, to do such
work;--neither are they likely to do it as a labour of love!
A splended translation of Flaubert might be expected from
several members of what is called "The New England School;"
but what Boston publisher would engage his favourite
literary man in such pursuits? It is really doubtful whether
the men most capable of making artistic translations could
afford, under any ordinary circumstances, to undertake much
work of the kind, except as a literary recreation. At all
events, the English-reading world cannot hereafter expect to
obtain its translations from other European languages
through the labour of the best writers in its own. The only
hope is, that the recklessness shown by publishers in their
choice of translators will provoke a reaction, and that such
work will be more generously remunerated and entrusted to
real experts hereafter.
It is unfortunately true that the translators who work for
English publishers are far more competent than those who do
similar work in the United States; forasmuch as
transatlantic firms are glad to print cheap popular
translations, while only inferior American firms care to
undertake them. Another obstacle to good translations in the
United States is that none of the great literary periodicals
will devote space to them. The English and the French
magazines and reviews are less conservative, and some very
wonderful translations have been published by them. Artistic
translation might be admirably developed in this country by
the establishment of a new magazine-policy.
The wise reader, if he is also a sincere friend of Hearn, must wish that
the correspondence published had been limited to the first volume. Room
aplenty in this could have been made for the dozen valuable paragraphs
contained in the second. It is not strange that the letters of Hearn
worth saving were written before his departure for Japan. He repeatedly
had urged that letter-writing both financially and mentally was
expensive to the writer. In Japan he was so incessantly busy, much with
his teaching and more with his real literary work, that time and will
were wanting for that sort of letters which are of interest to the
general reader. The interest of the person addressed is another affair.
The dreary half-thousand pages of the correspondence of the Japanese
time are most disappointing to one who has been thrilled by almost every
page of the incomparable letters to Krehbiel and to a few others.
Besides the two reasons for this which I have suggested, there are
others which may perhaps be evident to some judicious readers, but which
at this time may scarcely be plainly stated. At present the trees are so
thick that the forest cannot be seen, but some day an amused and an
amusing smile of recognition and disgust will curl the lips of the
literary critic. There are two other considerations which should be held
in mind: One of them was brought to me by a correspondent of Hearn who
had frequently noted it; sometimes (has it happened before?) Hearn used
his "friend" to whom he was writing, as a sort of method of exercising
his own fancy, as a gymnastics in putting his imagination through its
paces, or for a preliminary sketching in of notes and reminders to be of
possible use in later serious work. Moreover, the plan was of service in
rewarding his correspondents for their praise and appreciation. Of a
far more substantial character were the letters sometimes written in
gratitude for money received. Hearn flattered himself, as we know, that
he was without "cunning," but there is at least one exquisitely
ludicrous letter in existence which shows an inverted proof of it, in
the execution of an Indian war-dance, because of "the ways and means"
furnished.
As published, Hearn's letters may be classified as follows: To
Krehbiel 1887 (3); 1878 (5); 1879 (2);
1880 (3); 1881 (4); 1882 (4);
1883 (4); 1884 (13); 1885 (8);
1886 (6); 1887 (4) 56
Hart 1882 (3); 1883 (1) 4
Ball 1882 (2); 1883 (4); 1885 (3) 9
O'Connor 1883 (4); 1884 (2); 1885 (2);
1886 (2); 1887 (2) 12
Albee 1883 (1); 1898 (2) 3
Gould 1887 (5); 1888 (4); 1889 (8) 17
Bisland 1887 (8); 1889 (11); 1890 (3);
1900 (1); 1902 (3); 1903 (9);
1904 (1) 36
Tunison 1889 (1) 1
Chamberlain 1890 (7); 1891 (13);
1895 (22) 42
Nishida 1890 (2); 1891 (2); 1892 (2);
1893 (9); 1894 (2); 1895 (3);
1896 (3); 1897 (2) 25
Hirn 1890 (1); 1902 (5); 1903 (1) 7
Baker 1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894 (1);
1895 (3); 1896 (2) 8
Hendrick 1891 (2); 1892 (4); 1893 (10);
1894 (6); 1895 (6); 1896 (9);
1897 (7); 1898 (2); 1902 (2) 48
Otani 1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894 (1);
1897 (1); 1898 (2); 1900 (1) 7
Ochiai 1893 (2); 1894 (2); 1896 (2) 6
McDonald 1897 (10); 1898 (25); 1899 (19) 54
Fenollosa 1898 (3); 1899 (2) 5
Blank 1898 1
Foxwell 1899 2
Yasuchochi 1901 1
Tanabe 1904 1
Crosby 1904 1
Fujisaki 1904 1
---
347
Besides these, the valuable series of "Letters from a Raven," and the
sixteen in the same volume "To a Lady" are noteworthy. The latter are of
little value either for biography or literature. But the letters to
Watkin are so sincere, often childlike, indeed, that they will be prized
by the discriminating. Another admirable series, copies of which I have,
is made up of letters to Professor R. Matas, of New Orleans. To these it
is hoped will sometime be added those which must exist, to Mr. Alden,
who was an early and sincere friend. There are a number of unpublished
letters to Gould, and the published ones have been so mutilated that
they should be correctly republished. Almost anything written by Hearn
before he went to Japan, or in some instances reflecting friendships and
feelings existing before he sailed, may prove of as inestimable value as
most letters written thereafter will probably be found valueless.
It is noteworthy that the first series, edited by Miss Bisland, was
commenced in 1877, when Hearn was twenty-seven years of age, and that
for many years Mr. Krehbiel was almost his sole correspondent. But the
inimitable perfection and preciousness of these fifty-six letters! They
are well worth all his other set productions, published or burned, of
the same years. Many are singly worth all the rest of our letters. Here
the dreamer--and a dreamer he always was until he got out of his
cocoon--was sincere, hopeful, planful, as playful as his sombre mind
would permit, but always magnificently, even startlingly, unreserved.
Remembering that Hearn's mind was essentially an echoing and a
colouring mechanism, it is at once a glorious tribute to, and a
superlative merit of Mr. Krehbiel to have given the primary and
stimulating voice to the always listening dreamer. To have swerved him
out of his predestined role so much as to make these pages so
astonishingly full of _musical_ reverberations, is a tribute to his own
musical enthusiasm and power as it is also a demonstration of the
echo-like, but fundamentally unmusical, nature of his friend's mind. If
only in the final edition of Hearn's works, these letters with
selections of some pages from a few others, could be made into a handy,
small, and cheap volume for the delighting of the appreciators of
literature and of literary character! Comparison of the spiritual and
almost _spirituelle_ flashings of these, with the ponderous and banal
sogginess of hundreds upon hundreds of other pages of his letters,
arouses the profound regret that Hearn to the world was "impossible,"
that, as he says, he "could not mingle with men," that no other voices
ever so intimately reached the heart of him, or of his dreaming. Even
here the amazing coloration furnished by "The Dreamer," as he calls
himself, makes us at times feel that the magic of the word-artist and
colour-mixer was almost superior to the enduring and awakening reality
of Mr. Krehbiel. To this friend, as he writes, he spoke of his thoughts
and fancies, wishes and disappointments, frailties, follies, and
failures, and successes--even as to a brother. And that was not all he
saw and heard in "his enchanted City of Dreams."
The slavery to ignoble journalism, what he calls a "really nefarious
profession," was to be resolutely renounced from the day of his arrival
in New Orleans. It is "a horrid life," he "could not stand the
gaslight;" he "damned reportorial work and correspondence, and the
American disposition to work people to death, and the American delight
in getting worked to death;" he rebelled against becoming a part of the
revolving machinery of a newspaper, because "journalism dwarfs,
stifles, emasculates thought and style," and he was bound to "produce
something better in point of literary execution."
There was also a not frankly confessed resolve to become respectable in
other ways, and to be done with a kind of entanglement of which he was
painfully conscious in the Cincinnati life. "I think I can redeem myself
socially here! I have got into good society;" "it is better to live here
in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio," he writes,
and he is proud of living in a Latin city. He recognizes what Mr.
Krehbiel calls his "peculiar and unfortunate disposition," and which he
later sets forth as "a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular,
impulsive, variable, nervous disposition." Hearn visits a few friends
awhile and then disappears for six months, so that he wishes to be
hidden in New York except to Krehbiel and Tunison; he will pay a visit
to the others he must see just before leaving town--for he is a
"demophobe." He tried a secret partnership in keeping a restaurant, and
thought to carry on a little French bookstore. He resolved at different
times to go to Europe, to Cuba, to Texas, to Cincinnati, and planned all
sorts of occupations.
The indications soon multiply that in more ways than in worldly matters
he is at variance with his world. He "regards thought as a mechanical
process;" he has "no faith in any faith;" "individual life is a particle
of that eternal force of which we know so little;" "Soul = Cerebral
Activity = Soul;" Jesus is a legend and myth; he is "not a believer in
free will, nor in the individual soul," etc. Think of a man writing to a
Christian minister, think of a Christian minister receiving without
protest a personal letter with this in it: "Nor can I feel more
reverence for the crucified deity than for that image of the Hindoo god
of light holding in one of his many hands Phallus, and yet wearing a
necklace of skulls, etc."
And Hearn, as to ethics, has the courage to write his friend of his
convictions: "Passion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the
mother of language; its gratification the act of a creator, and the
divinest rite of Nature's temple." In other letters, unpublished, that
exist, Hearn is morbidly frank as to sexual licence and practices. In
tropical cities there is "no time for friendship--only passion for
women, and brief acquaintance for men." Without the influence of
sexualism there can be no real greatness; "the mind remains arid and
desolate," and he quotes approvingly:--"Virginity, Mysticism,
Melancholy--three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by
the Christ," etc. "I do not find it possible to persuade myself that the
'mad excess of love' should not be indulged in by mankind," introduces a
brilliant page upon the theme, ending with, "after all what else do we
live for--ephemerae that we are?" To my protest he wrote, "'Moral'
feelings are those into which the sexual instinct does not visibly
enter;" and again, "The sexual sense never tells a _physical_ lie. It
only tells an ethical one." There is, to be sure, no answer to a man who
says such things.
It is astonishing, how conscious and at the same time how careless Hearn
was of his characteristics and trends. In 1878 he could coldly prepare
to attempt a get-rich-quick scheme, "a fraud, which will pay like hell,
an advertising fraud," etc., because "there is no money in honest work."
At this time also he knew that his own wandering passion was "the
strongest of all," and that his deepest desire was "to wander forever
here and there until he should get old and apish and grey and die." His
misfortunes he confessed were of his own making because it was
absolutely out of the question for him to "keep any single situation for
any great length of time," hating the mere idea of it, "impossible to
stay anywhere without getting into trouble." "No one ever lived who
seemed more a creature of circumstance than I," he correctly avows. He
recognizes that "the unexpected obstacle to success was usually erected
by himself."
He acknowledges his ignorance and escapes from it and from the labour,
expense, and duty of scholarship by flying, as many others have done, to
the world of Imagination, which alone is left to him. "It allows of a
vagueness of expression which hides the absence of real knowledge, and
dispenses with the necessity of technical precision and detail." He
"never reads a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination."
Knowing that he has not true and real genius, he "pledges himself to the
worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.
It quite suits my temperament," and he "hopes to succeed in attracting
some little attention." The monstrous, the enormous, and the lurid, is
sought in the letters. The sentence at the bottom of page 226, Volume
One of the "Life and Letters," and the ghastly story, pages 322-323,
show the gruesome still much alive, and page 306 that blood, fury, and
frenzy haunt his nightmare dreams. "In history one should only seek the
extraordinary, the monstrous, the terrible; in mythology the most
fantastic and sensuous, just as in romance," And yet he defends himself
as a lover of Greek art, detests "the fantastic beauty that is Gothic,"
yet prides himself on being Arabesque. Even the love of Beaudelaire
creeps in, and the brutal, horrible photograph of Gautier is "grander
than he imagined." Of course to such a mind Matthew Arnold is a
"colossal humbug"--and worse.
With increasing frequency are repeated the complaints of
disillusionment; he is frightened at the loss even of the love of the
beautiful, and his friend tries in vain to rouse him from his ghost-life
and dreaming. There are absurd excuses why he cannot work; when among
beautiful things he cannot write of them, when he is away he is longing
for them; there are months when he cannot do anything, and a little
thing is produced with great pain and labour. "The old enthusiasm has
completely died out of me." The people and the city are adequately
cursed, and upon the debilitating climate is laid a proper and
ever-repeated anathema. He loathes the North, especially New York City,
"shudders at the bare idea of cold;" he yearns and pines for a still
more tropical country which he knows may kill him, and which came near
doing so. The _Wanderlust_ is upon him as passages on pages 183, 193,
196, 197, 207, 215, 223, 224, 398 of Volume One of the "Life and
Letters" illustrate. At last he is off for Martinique, where work and
even thought are still more impossible because of the benumbing heat.
Here follows a list of the unsigned editorials contributed by Hearn to
his paper. It is made up from two of the scrap-books left me, and is
entitled:
SUNDAY AND SPECIAL EDITORIALS BY LAFCADIO HEARN FOR THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT,
1885-1887.
1. The "Peronospora Ferrani" and Cholera Vaccination.
2. Literary Pessimism.
3. "The Song Celestial."
4. The Canonization of the Mahdi.
5. "Successor of Tamerlane."
6. The World's Journalism.
7. A Scientific Novelty.
8. The Jewish Question in Europe (Suppressed by the management).
9. Russian Literature Abroad.
10. The European Trouble.
11. Missionaries as Linguists.
12. Courbet.
13. Poetry and Pay.
14. The Present and Future of India.
15. An Archaeological Novel.
16. An Evolutional History.
17. A New Pompeii.
18. Archaeology in Cambodia.
19. The Great "I-Am."
20. A Terrible Novel.
21. The Latin Church in the East and Bismarck.
22. English Policy in China.
23. The Fear of Death.
24. A Danger to Egypt--The Senousiya.
25. Archaeological News from China.
26. Icelandic Prospects.
27. A Great English Physician.
28. Academical Triumphs.
29. The Magician of Paris.
30. Tolstoi's Vanity of Wisdom.
31. "Minos."
32. Newspapers and Religion.
33. Minos.
34. A Concord Compromise.
35. De Mercier on Dante.
36. The Origin of Christmas.
37. "Immortality" according to Dr. Holland.
38. The Future of Idealism.
39. "Solitude."
40. Dr. Holland's Defenders.
41. The Religion of Suffering.
42. The Ruins of Carthage.
43. A Defence of Pessimism.
44. Over-Education in Germany.
45. Decadence as a Fine Art.
46. Use of the Eye or the Ear in Learning Languages.
47. The Shadow of the "Light of Asia."
48. The Jew upon the Stage.
49. Some Theosophical Iconoclasm.
50. "Hamlet's Note-Book."
51. The Invasion of the Desert.
52. Resurrected AEstheticism.
53. Translations.
54. Nihilistic Literature in the United States.
55. Some Human Frailty.
56. An Art-Reformer.
57. Some Notes on Creole Literature.
58. The Scientific Value of Creole.
59. "l'OEuvre."
60. A Havanese Romance.
61. Some Supposed Sanscrit Translations.
62. The Omnivorous Newspaper.
63. A Religious Nightmare.
64. Joaquin Miller.
65. Pictures vs. Text.
66. "Follow the Donkey Path."
67. A Sketch of the Creole Patois.
68. In Spain.
69. Chinese Belief in God.
70. "Towards the Gulf."
71. Tennyson's Locksley Hall.
72. "Doesn't Want Any Progress."
73. The Howard Memorial Library--A Letter from Charles Dudley Warner.
74. A Definitive Rossetti.
75. The Chinese Future.
76. Artistic Value of Myopia.
77. Colours and Emotions.