LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
"Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and
fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties
and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would
write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem
strange in words, appears very strange upon paper."
Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed
with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed,
for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various
friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland
(Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the
many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during
the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of
publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine
that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which
his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the
outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and
versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to
pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and
sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles,
his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily
intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and
a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting
considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and
thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity.
To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to
plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it
was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work.
Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn
would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion,
especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own
room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he
habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument;
these he would leave later on Gould's study table.
To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face
to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In
his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and
sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour.
Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature,
inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being
egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd
specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed amongst
an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a
necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought;
his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of
spirit--perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding
him--a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted
country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of
temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of
remarkable picturesqueness and reality.
The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given
possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely
different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am
not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual
petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of
relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the
world.
Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore,
been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely
interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto
shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories,
incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and
people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to
outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his
half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and
intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and
unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the
charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you
would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering
friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all,
in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private
inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his
undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a
Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are
addressed.
It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life
that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him
and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled
the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual
struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to
Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque
silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western
city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom
hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant
to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting
higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day
in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever
cometh.'"
He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and
ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the
Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles,
publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist,
he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of
the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss
Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her
magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable."
Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a
particle of literary jealousy in his composition.
To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old
fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain
qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an
Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical.
You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and
labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I
cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the
thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think."
Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically
averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald
not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an
opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of
the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the
thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can
see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others
would reach the same standard.
In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor
Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most
finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his
boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College.
He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his
advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that
give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in
prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he
says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one
side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be
sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a
medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose.
In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio
Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing
no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little
man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make his a
trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood
or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to
commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of
the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not
see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an
extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and
unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic
theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though
you were passing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape.
You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round
the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical
passage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather
was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than
ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his
possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude,
others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others
dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage
the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries,
freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen.
Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him
hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance
and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of
people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other
day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan
unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there
came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and
sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty,
all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that
voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back,
and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14]
[14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he
could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having
learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson,
Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating
the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at Kumamoto
entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's
poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because
Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson
had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all
honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century,"
because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" reminded him of Miss
Bisland. He pronounced Matthew Arnold to be "one of the colossal humbugs
of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and an unutterably dreary essayist,"
because at the moment he was animated by one of his intense enthusiasms
for _Edwin_ Arnold, whose acquaintance Hearn had made during one of
Arnold's visits to Japan. "Far the nobler man and writer, permeated with
the beauties of strong faiths and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in
some happier era, may bless mankind with the universal religion in
perfect harmony with the truths of science, and the better nature of
humanity."
But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique or
partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpassed, here and there
expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when
passing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like
a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises
suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of
phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside
the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are
shimmering, a mass of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the
dullest subjects--writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the subject
of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain force, he
suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and Shintoism.
"There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and race
feeling. I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a
Polish brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells
the story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still
under the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least
murmur,--'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands fell, but
the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At last, old
Steinmetz gave a signal--_the_ signal. The bugles rang out with the
force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air forbidden ever to
be sung or heard at other times--the national air (you know it)--'_No!
Poland is not dead_!' And with that crash of brass all that lives of the
brigade was hurled at the French batteries. Mechanical power, if
absolutely irresistible, might fling back such a charge, but no human
power. For old Steinmetz had made the mightiest appeal to those 'Polish
brutes' that man, God, or devil could make, the appeal to the ghost of
the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a
thousand years."
Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld
Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some
everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas,
connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely
recounted:--
"'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years
ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been
surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed
not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a
stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then
came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly
sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense
thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in
tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang
Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous,
audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in
my heart still."
Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there
were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance.
Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among
these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of
Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysantheme," Hearn retained the same
admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman
d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaitre or Anatole
France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will
have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die,
one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read
'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."
Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of
the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told
us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an
argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's
criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement,
repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his
soft musical voice.
A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject
of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat
apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the
insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a
flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so
accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement.
Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the
biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the
world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little
boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in
Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the
Japanese kimono.
At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of
promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he
was a much more responsible and important person than the little
"brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office,
turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in
consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping
gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his
complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient
features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes,
the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the
other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the
disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in
conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always
photographed in profile looking down.
In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and
well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited
the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the
musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo
University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and
white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made
his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal
manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before
the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I
first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to
begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice;
seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much,
and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind
ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but
nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be
surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and
whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected,
companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was
extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a
physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his
tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with
velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and
gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and
you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly,
he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He
appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I
found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in
Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion,
tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious.
Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a
foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in
appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our
acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any
better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting."
Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately
protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy,
diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting
attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb
themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they
could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in the streets of
Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a
queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step,
singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould
tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional headgear for the
enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel shirt, that
he habitually wore.
Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a
starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as
a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't
wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do.
"Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an
article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts!
Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in
itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It
represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious
class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons
sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."
In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is
unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing
winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His
wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject
of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his
Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have
nothing that was not of the best make and quality.
In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd,
nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated
voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean
in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you
came in contact with him.