THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS
"The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses
and change them several times a day; and the multitude of
dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to
the multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she
was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was
of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of
the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and
people doubted their own senses when they saw these things
... and the men who most admired her could not presume to
fall in love with her because that would have been absurd.
She had altogether too many souls."
The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course
of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he
had hitherto known entered his life, an influence destined to last for
close on a quarter of a century, from these New Orleans days until the
month of September, 1904, when he died.
In all the annals of literary friendships between men and women, it is
difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory than
this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange
little Irish genius.
Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more tender,
none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and friendship, as
told in his letters.
The affection between Jean Jacques Ampere and Madame Recamier is the one
that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is
reversed. Madame Recamier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth
Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been
something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable
blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity,
shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of
affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him
in the tussle of life.
Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for
Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his
life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the
unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable
thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was
disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his
side.
"There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik
from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore,
"whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well
for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement."
Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better
self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed
conviction that her love--as love is understood in common
parlance--could never be his.
And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare
in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere
friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not;
she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her
lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was
offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a
neophyte, also worshipped.
* * * * *
Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner,
ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family
by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her
parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of
journalistic work in New Orleans.
Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the _Times
Democrat_. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the
beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an
appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed
of what were known as "Hearn's admirers."
His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange
Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He
also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then
slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called
them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them
all--love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a
thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant
fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of
green hashisch.
One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse--
"My heart would hear her and beat
Had I lain for a century dead;--
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red."
The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the _Times Democrat_.
There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years,
wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic"
was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitchell
McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to the
expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor
Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story
in which I first used it--years and years ago. Don't return the
thing--it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush."
Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return
the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead
Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to
deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is
distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French
Impressionist school.
The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the
unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of
continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate
every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by
Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.
A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love,
yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his
lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb
the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the
litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that
which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor
Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of
music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and
the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And
at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by
his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient
place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle
of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she,
unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away
forever.
Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a
period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The
problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron.
Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who
preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence,
dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his
idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not
obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself
in the mediocrity to which she belonged.
Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland
had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange
old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness,
and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where
she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a
grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought,
_une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could give the same
sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the
country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a
particular variety of savage, that he could not understand--and was
afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since
then I have become grey and the father of three boys."
For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's
friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position
of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to
induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social
unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this
young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic
beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems,
he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby,
has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But
if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres francaises' (as
Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a
nicer copy...."
Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her,
mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her
voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The
gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom
in the room--but in the future, which was black without stars!"
In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for
his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the
same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature
of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the
copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the
Tertiary epoch--three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most
ancient branch of humanity."
It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was
written and contributed to _Harper's Magazine_ under the title of "Torn
Letters."
We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New
York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she
taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of
circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and
subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as
you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to
chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the
memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best
inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his
genius and quickened his pen.
I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when
she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I
looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in
lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as
he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers
was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the
Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for
dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.
In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the
_Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent
correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.
She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think
I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a
pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much
better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own
personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does
a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?
"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow,
but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at
this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the
nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of
existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved
simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of
the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek
romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic
sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing
but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case,
this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work
he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever
attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was
occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at
highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches,
the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details,
that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and
accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the
descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being
fragmentary and unfinished.
After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of
literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly,
writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing
her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope.
"It is a formality--and you are you; and you are not a formality--but a
somewhat--and I am only I."[15]
[15] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland
ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional
life.
During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies for
his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two
delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he
was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to
him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years.
The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and
pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a word:--
"Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed solid was
breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very
foolish--made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter
was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it
is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the
Unknown for Art's sake,--or rather, you _must_ obey them. The Spahi's
fascination by the invisible forces was purely physical. I think I am
right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a
home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance
compelling another change.
"The carriage--no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or
sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East
River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I
shan't put anybody's name to it."[16]
[16] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to
George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia.
On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to
call at the office of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. On her arrival at
eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York
for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey
round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in
competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss
Bisland consented.
After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she
published her experiences in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. These
contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are
charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as
the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period.
Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that
he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of
a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers
and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return.
He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never
audible in dreams.
In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not
I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in
the _Tribune_ there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of
unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,--an absurd sense of absolute
loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for
you to win your race--so that every one may admire you still more, and
your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your
portrait--in spite of you--appear in some French journal where they know
how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one
from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in
succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of
you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..."
I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are
any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of
the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems
almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give
the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words
but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the
multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead
within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face.
"It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you--all the Me's
that were--keep asking the Me that is, for something always
refused;--and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot
see--you can only feel; and I can see,--and I will not open to you,
because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would
be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep
and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake
up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in
spite of yourself,--and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would
come--and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ...
what was it?
"Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of
it,--just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly
exposed.... Will you ever be _like that always_ for any one being?--I
hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at
latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you
will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the
leaves."
Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around
the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of
his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and
then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and
she married Mr. Wetmore.
Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between the
time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his
professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the
simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he
think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the
_jeune fille un peu farouche_, who in distant New Orleans days had
understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's
unsophisticated enthusiasm. She had written to him, and he gives her a
whimsically pathetic answer, touching on memories, on thoughts, on
aspirations, which had been a closed book for so long a period of time,
and now, when re-opened, was seen to be printed as clearly on mind and
heart as if he had parted with her but an hour before.
About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September, 1904--the
month in which he died--comes his last. He tells her that to see her
handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was a great
pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was undeserved.
He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese Miscellany" which he
had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its way, and perhaps you
will later on find no reason to be sorry for your good opinions of the
writer. I presume that you are far too clever to believe more than
truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a few estimable
people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...."
He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing to
her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear in
book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on
sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects
and flowers, and queer small things--and leave the subject of the
destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains
will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the
book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will
recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof.
"May all good things ever come to you, and abide."
It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years, that
he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any affection or
sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may read," is this
record of a devotion and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a
century, lasting intact through fair years and foul, through absence,
change of scene, even of nationality.
"Fear not, I say again; believe it true
That not as men mete shall I measure you...."
Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for
the estimation of human character and genius.