SHORT though it was in time, the Philadelphia visit in 1889 has a value
long in significance, that deserves epitomization. To begin with, it was
Hearn's first experience of anything that might be called home-life. Its
result was a softening and normalizing of him both as to character and
as to manner, which was most evident. Secondly, and as he chose to put
it, I "gave him a soul." By this poetic paraphrase he meant that I had
succeeded in bringing to his recognition the existence of Freedom in
what he thought determinism;--that intelligence, purpose, and
beneficence lie behind biology, and that human beings are not always,
and may never be wholly, the slaves of the senses, and the dupes of
desire. Beauty itself, which he so widely sought, I asked him to note,
is a needless, harmful, and even impossible thing in a world of
adamantine logic and necessity. Above all, I demonstrated the existence
of Duty, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," not only in the abstract,
but in concrete lives, in social and historic exemplifications, and that
only by means of men and women who obey conscience is social and
historic progress brought about. They who have not seen that can have no
"soul;" they who do see it, have soul, durable or great according to the
clearness of the seeing and the obedience to the implication. Fully and
freely Hearn acknowledged the vision, and never afterward could he be
wholly the same as he had been before. But the Providence of the
Oriental and semi-barbarous is Improvidence, and their God is Fate.
Hearn came to hate, or to pretend to hate, the truth which had now
slipped through his spiritual eyes, but he could not undo or outroot it
entirely; "henceforth by the vision splendid is on his way attended."
Thirdly, this new viewpoint, this new spirit or soul, I got incorporated
in a little art-work, or ethical study--"Karma," published in
_Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890, after Hearn had gone to Japan. To
the world and without the knowledge of its making, "Karma" must have
seemed an illogical and even impossible thing for Hearn to have written.
It is apparently the sole work which he ever wrote, created _de novo_
and without the data having been found or brought to him from without.
But it was only a seeming creation. It was only the telling, the
colouring, that was his, as in his other tales before or after. In our
long walks and talks in the Park at night, we wrought out the title, the
datum, and the whole trend of the story. He rebelled, but I held him to
the task, which he finally executed with frank and artistic loyalty. The
pride or indifference, even the dislike, of its readers, the writer, or
inspirer, is as nothing compared with the fact that by it and from it
Hearn learned something of love and duty that had never before been a
living reality to him. What an infinite distance it was removed from
anything dreamed during the Cincinnati period, or to be derived from
Flaubert, Gautier, or Beaudelaire! After that his future work could
never be, and never was, what it was from the writing, "_Everything you
feel you would not like me to know._" I do not think there is
exaggeration of the importance of the story, and what led up to its
writing, in saying that it was the greatest of the turning-points in his
life, and that directly because of it the magnificent works of the
Japanese period were profoundly influenced through the attitude of mind
thereby gained.
Concerning the heroine of the tale Hearn wrote me:
Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already
abandoned it. It would have to be sexual. Never could find
in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood, which in
the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about
sex, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect
natures inspire a love that is a fear. I don't think any
love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a
love that is half compassion; this is always dangerous,
untrustworthy, delusive--pregnant with future pains
innumerable.
But, fourthly, that in which I feel as great a pride, is compelling him
to go to Japan. Others could have reported for lurid yellow journalism,
others might possibly have translated as well as he, others could have
told the West Indian stories, but--not even his beloved Lowell--only
Hearn could have written of the Japanese life and soul as Hearn has
done. He had no thought of the journey when I showed him his duty and
his opportunity. By argument, pleading, almost compulsion, I at last
wearied his opposition, and he went, with reluctance, after months of
halting in detested New York City in which he learned by bitter
experience that it was no place for him, and that his beloved tropics
should not be again sought.
How disappointed he was in his New York friends and prospects may be
gathered from the following excerpt taken from one of his letters to me.
I had used all my influence to keep him from a stay in the city. He
wrote as follows:
Dear Gooley, your advice is good from your way of looking
at it; but I am much stronger in New York than you imagine,
and my future in it is plain and perfect sailing if I keep
good health. I am only embarrassed for the moment. I am
quite a lion here, and could figure in a way you would
hardly guess, if I were not such a man of tentacles. I am
not afraid of the cold--though it disheartens fancy a
little; but I shall leave fancy alone for a while. No,
Gooley, dear Gooley, I shall make my way in New York--don't
be afraid for me.
He soon became convinced that I was right and finally resumed the
journey unwillingly. The end has justified the means and the sacrifices.
It is plain that the Japanese period and work crown his life-labours
splendidly, and that his masterful pictures of Japanese characters,
traditions, and religion now constitute one of our most precious
literary treasures. They have also been of profound service to Japan.
When he left my home, he, of his own accord, asked me to care for his
library, then in the home of Mr. Alden at Metuchen, New Jersey, who two
years previously had consented to take charge of it, and had paid
shipping expenses, insurance, etc. None can imagine anything ungenerous
or unkind in Mr. Alden. An old Cincinnati acquaintance characterizes
Hearn's action in the matter as "a swindle." I have no knowledge or hint
how it was or could be of that nature. Hearn wrote all the letters, and
made all the arrangements to have the books sent to me. Mr. Alden
authorizes me to say:
"I was perfectly convinced at the time of the transfer of the library to
Dr. Gould that he had no desire for its possession, and that the
transfer was made solely in accordance with Mr. Hearn's request. I am
quite sure that Dr. Gould fully explained the matter to me at the time.
I feel sure that Dr. Gould acted precisely as I should have done if I
had retained possession of the library; that is, readily giving it up to
any legitimate claimant." I found the books of no value to me, and they
surely have been an expense. I tried, later, to prevail upon Hearn to
allow me to ship them to him in Japan, but I never received any replies
to my letters. He asked for the catalogue, some of the old books, and
beside these, at his request, a number of expensive new books were at
various times bought and sent to him. I suspect that as there was not a
book on Japan in the collection, and as he had a plethora of data at
hand such as he wanted, the library gathered with so much love and
enthusiasm was no longer of use to him, especially under the conditions
of his life there.
Hearn gained strength and power as regards both truth and art, in so far
as he was true to the better in himself; all his trouble and his
weakness were born out of the lower self he would not, or could not,
sacrifice. His worship of the blood-curdling and revolting gave him some
temporary vogue among the readers of yellow newspaperdom, but not until
that was renounced for the compromise of the "odd and ghostly" did he
begin to show an ability to reach something more worthy in human nature
than the degenerate reporter catered to. The next step in advance was
the cultivation of the artistic pornography of the sensualistic French
story-writer. Not until he renounced this did he once more come to the
something of more use to the reading world which fills the Martinique
epoch. His disinclination to go to Japan, I more than suspect, was owing
to a half consciousness that there was in that nation too much
civilization, too good character, and even too much religion to suit the
tastes which had been uppermost in motiving his past literary labours.
His going into utter, illogical, and absurd captivity to the atheistic
and materialistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer was a sorry sacrifice of
his nobler office and better destiny to the fate that relentlessly
dogged his footsteps. He was forced into all the humanity and
beneficence possible to him by Japanese restraint, art, and truth. His
cries of disillusion over the Japanese were largely the anger of the
semi-barbaric wanderer held by family ties, paternity, etc., when he
found himself prevented from again seeking the faraway tropical
pseudo-paradises of peoples but one remove from savagery.
In the pre-Japanese periods only the lurid, the monstrous, the enormous,
only hot crime, and sexual passion, could excite his liveliest interest,
and all great literature was as much ignored as if it did not exist.
There is not a hint in all he did that he had read a line of the great
creators of literature,--the Greek dramatists, Dante, Goethe,
Shakespere, and a hundred more; he could not give time to read, much
less study them. His pretension of ability to teach English literature
was soon recognized even by the Japanese, and it is well that
over-zealous friends did not secure him a lectureship at Cornell
University. To be sure, he never had time to study even the history of
his own science and art,--but he never would have done so, it is plain,
if leisure and opportunity had been offered him. The ideal and the
rewards of scholarship never entered his mind. Perhaps it was best for
his peculiar office and proficiency that he allowed all erudition to go
unlooked-upon. And yet if he had been possessed of sufficient virility
and objectivity of mind to have learned the Japanese language, what
would the labour not have been worth? That he could not read a Japanese
book or newspaper after fourteen years of life among the people is most
disconcerting. It is a tribute to the amazing delicacy and receptiveness
of his mind that while he could not speak to his wife or children in
their own tongue, he should still have so accurately caught the Japanese
spirit and so admirably conveyed it to us.
The history of Hearn's ghoulish pleasure in the gruesome and
sensualistic, runs from the tan-yard horror and Cincinnati reportorial
days, through the translated stories of the New Orleans epoch, to his
"St. Anthony." In "Stray Leaves" it is but little softened, and yet the
atmosphere is brightening. It glitters and flashes like vengeful
lightning about the clouds of his mind with the Martinique epoch, etc.;
but in the Japanese writing even the "Mountain of Skulls" and other
stories are so far removed from reality that our disgust sinks to a
smile of sighing wonder that the gruesome could still be so loved by
him. It is only a few of the brutal and a small brutalized public that
seeks such _contes drolatiques_ (without Balzac's wit, satire, and
power, of course), and so again perforce, Hearn was weaned from his
morbidities. Dominated by his developing art and also by the need to
sell his writings, he thus rose, partly by the command of his readers,
to the choice of less and less repulsive themes and methods, and, awed
by the Japanese spirit of gentleness and beauty, he finally endowed
their national soul-life with a prismatic glory which they themselves
had hardly suspected.
Hearn deserted the god of religion, and, except in one respect, he was
faithless to the god of ethics. He was, therefore, without any divinity.
For a mind that had no creative ability, that _must_ have its _subjects_
furnished to it, a mind whose sole function was to colour the data
chosen or given from without,--this inner emptiness could only be
deceived by but could not be satisfied with the inner emptiness of
Spencerism. He acknowledged that religion was the mother of all
civilization, arts, and laws, and that all social systems, arts, and
laws, antique or modern, were begotten and nurtured by ethics,--and yet
there was no reality in, no reason for the existence of either religion
or ethics in this world of mechanics and of fatalism, grim and
inexorable.
Hearn speaks somewhere of his aspiration to be considered a "thinker,"
and once he praises "science" as a source of data for working into the
art forms of his beloved poetic prose. But science to him was as
impossible as was he to polite society; Spencer gave him leave, he
thought, to consider his atheism, irreligion, and sensualisticism as
scientifically authorized, and logically justified. He was always
hankering after the old heathen, even savage, gods of his father and
mother; and every time he went Fantee with them, he came back to a saner
world weakened and still more at war with himself. He always sought an
impossible world where Teutonic worth and honour could supply a decadent
Latin, with half-savage languor and never failing delights of the senses
and of art,--art which, in the last analysis, was his only god. But his
tragedy was that he always hastened to turn his god into a fetich, while
even his mind caught disquieting glimpses of the awful truth that all
genuine worship abjures fetichism. As sensualism is the superstition of
love, so fetichistic art is the superstition of true aesthetics.
For the most part, minds are mechanical not chemical compoundings, or if
chemic, they are in very unstable equilibrium. There are strange and
wayward traits, illogic and unfused to unity with the others. There may
be psychopathic and isolation wards in the psyche, "retreats," and all
manner of diseases of individual organs. Most people go Fantee, often or
seldom, and are able to hide their fetichisms from even their best
friends. If we observe ourselves at all, most of us wonder at the
curious mix of self-contradictories in ourselves. The few whose souls
and bodies are fused to clear-cut unity, the component metal melted to
harmony in the foundry of Fate and of Purpose,--these clang loyally in
absolute and precise tone-colour. In commoner folk the failure of the
flux, and the flaws in the casting, have only a social significance, but
with the Hearns, with thinkers and writers, the affair has an infinite
purport.
Hearn could never make his writings and his art impulses square with his
beloved materialistic, deterministic philosophy. He did not believe in
soul or in souls, and yet his soul was always treating of souls, and
showing the invisible thread of continuity which links souls to Soul.
Therefore he is always happiest when his _daimon_ breaks from the
restraint of theory and fate and pictures the play of free spirit, of
soul unconquered by fate, of life victorious over death in some sad way
or bright.
Concerning Hearn's treatment of friends, editors, and publishers, as it
bears sharply upon his literary character and productivity, as little as
may or must be said: He was under bonds to Fate to abuse worst the
majority of his friends who were most magnanimous, helpful, and kind to
him personally, or who were most discriminating and encouraging toward
his art and artistic ideals. To his former Cincinnati comrades, except
the old printer-friend, he scarcely ever wrote after he left them, and
the most faithful of these recently writes me: "I never pretended to be
a friend to him; I was merely one to whom he resorted when all the rest
cast him out. He never found me wanting, but he got few letters from me,
and none that were flattering." "I used to love Matas" are Hearn's
pitiful words. It is with sorrow and pain that we note the sudden
cessation in 1887 of the letters to Krehbiel. This noble friend had
drawn from Hearn a beautiful world of play and enduring memories, and
one may be more than sure that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed.
Baker had been his most helpful and best friend, and yet for a fancied
wrong Hearn wrote him a letter filled with insult and ruffianism which a
gentleman could not answer, hardly forgive, and never forget. Did Hearn
know anybody of character in the West Indies? To the greatest of
American editors, the one who "discovered" him and introduced him to a
national and international audience, who treated him with a sweet and
gracious benignity, even after a shamelessness that is indescribable--to
this good man there is not a published letter, although many, and many
more, must exist. One day while at my house, Hearn rushed to his room,
seized the man's picture on the wall, tore it in a hundred pieces, and
danced and spat upon it in a furious rage. In subsequent letters to me
he explained his hatred--how he broke his engagements, how he borrowed
money from his loathed and insulted friend, how he got credit through
him from his tailor, etc. Gently the abused one bore it all and without
the least remonstrance, writing me, "Hearn has utterly cast me off; I
was loath to part with him." Professor Chamberlain and others kindly
explain the curious morbid psychology which Hearn had exhibited towards
them. To the last, love and trust breathed from Hearn's letters to me,
and yet I learn that to others long afterward he wrote of me with
bitterness and malevolent injustice. And yet he had written me after I
saw him for the last time, in this way: "Please don't write me at all,
or expect me to write, for some months. I do not need any money. I have
a good deal on my mind, and am apt, in consequence, to do very stupid or
very unkind things in an unlucky moment." And then he wrote: "No, dear
Gooley, I will never be indifferent to you! Never think that; I
understand better than you suppose. If I am silent at intervals, never
doubt me, dear teacher and brother; and you will find everything come
right." How often is the pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving way
to foolish, needless, and degrading inherited instincts at the expense
of the higher life and usefulness! As to some who ludicrously boast of
the long continuance of an intimate friendship, there are many letters
of Hearn extant and unpublished which blow out that vanity with an
amusing smile. The matter, generally, might not have so real an
importance were it not that the publishing of literature has a vast deal
to do with literature, and, closely examined, Hearn's quarrels with
editors, publishers, and the public, is a matter that reaches out
astonishingly both as regards himself, his books, and the interest in
him, as well as beyond the question of Hearn or of any or all of his
friends. Until one silent man consents to speak--which may never be--the
discussion of the essence of the affair cannot be set forth in any
detail. Passages in Hearn's letters relating thereto should never have
been published, or a hundred other things should have been as frankly
published. When such publicity shall exist the reasons will be manifest
why one publisher destroyed an entire fresh edition of one book of
Hearn, why another acted differently, why one is praised or praises
himself, why others are blamed, why some are silent although a word
would end the injustice, etc. One phase may be noted in
passing:--Whatever Hearn's rights or wrongs as to the author's relations
with publishers and editors, it was beyond the ken of his mind that one
who may gloriously sacrifice all his own temporal blessings in striving
after artistic excellence, has no right to ask the same altruism of
those engaged in the publishing business. Hearn blamed the crude world,
and, for him, its representatives in the persons of editors and their
masters, the publishers, for wishing a certain kind of literature. As
well blame the bookseller for not sending the book you had not ordered.
He who deliberately chooses to give the world a literature he knows it
does not want, must accept the rejection and editing of his manuscripts,
and the absence of the world's cheques. He chose poverty and may not
abuse them who allowed his choice to be realized. It is sad enough, but
it is more than childish to grumble, more than ignoble to rail.
The search for "inspiration," as he called it, was with Hearn constant
and lifelong. Thus, early in his career, he wrote to his friend, Dr.
Matas:
So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of
Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think
they will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of
the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns
of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes
bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the
perfume of the sea, he can't help writing _something_. And
he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of
the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the
Spirit that moveth over the deep is the Creator
indeed--vivifying, illuminating, strengthening. I really
feel his Religion--the sense of awe that comes to one in
some great silent temple. You would feel it too under this
eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching
the keys of his mighty organ....
And again he wrote:
I think I _must_ get inspiration. The real secret of art is
feeling. The highest form of that feeling is that which the
splendour of Nature gives--the thrill and awe of terrible
beauty. This is that inexplicable communication of the
mind with the Unknowable that has created the religious
sense. Said a friend to me yesterday, who is not a
believer:--"I stood in the Alps at sunrise, and I knew what
religion meant." And I think that passage in Wilson on
Fetichism superb where he says that the sight of the
splendid sky first created the religious sense. Terribly
perverted this sense has been, no doubt; but it belongs, I
fancy, to those things which are eternal, and will have
many a glorious avatar before our planet floats off into
the cemetery of dead worlds. It is, I believe, the most
powerful possible motive for true modern poetry--in harmony
with science and scientific faith; and that is what I am
going to look for.
Such quotations could be multiplied indefinitely, but toward the end
they become begging, and moaning in character. The "inspiration" is
diligently hunted, hungrily waited for; at last the failure in its
coming grows pitiful and tragic. For what is inspiration? If, with the
fatal fashion of our fashionable fatalism, we think "we have outgrown
all that," all that which was real and genuine inspiring, we at least
cannot outgrow that which bred the belief in the inspiring, the trust in
spirit and in spiritual truths and forces. Is it all primitive
childishness, this faith in a real breathing-in of the higher life into
our more carnal hearts and minds? Far from it! It is the veriest of
verities, and the _deniers_ of the conditions of inspiration dry up the
springs of that "inspiration" which they so hungrily seek. The semblance
cannot be without the reality. It will not come, lasting and
inexhaustible, by any trick of literary technic. Out of the light of
common day is not born that which never was on any sea or shore. Place,
time, circumstance, are not, as Hearn thought, the gods of
"Inspiration." "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and even a heathen
god would hardly visit the altar with his sacred fire if the priests
mocked at the power and the very existence of the deity. It is most
plain that Hearn early and zealously studied the Bible--hundreds of
allusions bear witness of the fact--and that he learned from it the
revivification of words, the use of phrase, metaphor, belief, something
of the art of reaching in toward the depths of men's moral and religious
nature and experience: but all, just so evidently, as a literary art, a
_tour de force_, the skill of the expert workman, handling them as
symbols for the sake of the skill, while smiling scornfully at any
belief in their reality. Language is the most spirit-like creation of
man's mind, the thing nearest him, woven out of his own soul-substance,
instinct with his life, haunted with his love, his hate, his suffering.
Playing with words, using them as art-stuff, regardless of the
experience and love and suffering which gave them conceiving and gives
them quickening, is likely to bring upon the artist a sad revenge.
Pleading in vain for "inspiration," Hearn died a score or more of years
before he should have died.
It should be emphasized that Hearn had but one possible way, chosen or
compelled, to make a living. His terrible myopia shut him out from every
calling except that of a writer. Moreover, leaving aside the danger to
his little vision from so much ocular labour, he had other and almost
insurmountable handicaps as a poet or maker of literature: He had no
original thing to say, for he was entirely without creative power, and
had always to borrow theme and plot. Then he had never seen form, knew
almost nothing of it as it exists out there, so that his sole technic
was that of a colourist, and also to endow our dead and dying words with
life--a "ghostly" life it was, and as he chose it to be--but living it
assuredly was. That he over-coloured his pictures, that he
over-sensualized his words, of this there is no question--but monotones
and senescents that we are, let us not smile too superciliously! Let us
learn; and above all let us enjoy!
For, his alone was the palette of the painter of the afterglow of
Earth's last sunset. And his the unique miracle of clothing with the
hues of a hopeless rainbow, the faint reverberations of bells far sunk
in the wreck and wrack of ruined centuries; of reintoning the prayers of
Nirvana-entering souls; of remoaning dear ancient and expiring griefs;
of seeing with shut eyes the sad smiles of never-answered loves and
never-meeting lovers. With him, hushed, we hearken to Muezzin Bilal's
call from his tower, to the broken sobs of a dancing-girl's passion, or
to the plaintive beggings of dying babes for the cold breasts of dead
mothers.