WEST INDIES
"Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden
leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred
peaks,--over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes
from the hills--all cool out of the sleep of the forest, ...
and the wild high winds that run roughling and crumpling
through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery
sound. And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green drenched
with silent pouring of creepers ... and the eternal azure
apparition of the all-circling sea.... And the violet velvet
distances of evening, and the swaying of palms against the
orange-burning sunset,--when all the heavens seem filled with
vapours of a molten sun!"
In the early part of June, 1887, Hearn left New Orleans, and made his
way to New York via Cincinnati. He went to see no one in the western
city, where he had been so well known, but his old friend Mr. Watkin.
Seated in the printing-office, then situated at 26, Longworth Street,
they chatted together all day to the accompaniment of the ticking of the
tall clock, loud and insistent, like the footstep of a man booted and
spurred. We can imagine their discussions and arguments on the subject
of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, Esoteric Buddhism, and "that which the
Christian calls soul,--the Pantheist Nature,--the philosopher, the
Unknowable."
Hearn took his departure from Cincinnati late in the evening. A
delightful trip, he wrote to Mr. Watkin, had brought him safe and sound
to New York, where his dear friend, Krehbiel, was waiting to receive him
and take him as a guest to his cosy home. "I cannot tell you," he adds,
"how our little meeting delighted me, or how much I regretted to depart
so soon.... I felt that I loved you more than I ever did before; feel
also how much I owed you and will always owe you."
Mr. Watkin, who died in the spring of 1911, aged eighty-six, spent the
last years of his life in the "Old Men's Home" in Cincinnati. I received
a letter from him a few months before his death relating to his friend
Lafcadio Hearn. After this meeting in 1887, he was never fated to see
his "Raven," but the old man kept religiously all the letters written to
him by the odd little genius, who forty years before had so often sat
with him in his printing-office, pouring forth his hopes and ambitions,
his opinions and beliefs, his wild revolts and despairs. Loyally did the
old printer add his voice to Krehbiel's and Tunison's in defence of his
reputation after Hearn's death in 1904.
The Krehbiels lived in a flat, 438, West Fifty-seventh Street, New York,
and Lafcadio had arranged to stop with them there before he left New
Orleans.
Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the _Tribune_ necessitated his
frequenting busy literary and social circles; it is easy to imagine how
Hearn, just arrived from the easy-going, loafing life of New Orleans,
must have suffered in such a _milieu_.
Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's
letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds,
"that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either
Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of
the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's
temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found
himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told
Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a
horrible nightmare, that he had been a demophobe for years, hating
crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here
I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help
it;--just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall
want to be very well hidden away in New York,--to see no one except you
and Joe."
It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this
sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him
in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had
not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment
and feeling must have arisen between them in that space of ten years,
subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the
passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters
transmitted across thousands of miles.
Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in
argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was
inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and
gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in
the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn,
Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of
her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had
lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for
thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion.
Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental
tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel
correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths
and Vandals--and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that
Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the
fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan
art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that
claims art merit by a Gothic standard.
From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public
by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely
for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of
the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on
the other hand--no musician from a technical point of view--frankly
declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's
sonata or an opera by Wagner.
Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "Hearn and
Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he
ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he
wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British
characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had
heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were
fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he
thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was
constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions,
by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The
_glissando_ effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of
tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal
splinterings.' They had for him a great charm."
Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the
_Cosmopolitan Magazine_. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see
her. "Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything
seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and
confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you--but since you
live in Hell what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison.
To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him,
so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters
when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British
Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the _Barracouta_
for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a
trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared
originally in _Harper's Monthly_. It was afterwards incorporated in his
larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies."
Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics,
is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans
physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as
ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced
enthusiasms.
He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and,
unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at
Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply
heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no snobs; everything primitive
and morally pure. Confound fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave
them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West
Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but
nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms
distilled _Elixir Vitae_."[19]
[19] Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in
the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for
Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope
that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or
somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of
safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the
publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friendship, the two
comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the
close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as
if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion.
During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in
the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on
the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on
board the _Barracouta_, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the
French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird
atmosphere, that make his Japanese books so arresting and original, is a
delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart
of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never
written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at
least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end
of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is
well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West
Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep,"
written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are
interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly
you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the
music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking
through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank
the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing
magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it
is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:--
"Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people.
On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself
alone, you may often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than
hear behind you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body,
dumb oscillations of raiment,--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter
swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."
"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated
"A mon cher ami,
"LEOPOLD ARNOUX
"Notaire a Saint Pierre, Martinique.
"Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des
sympathies echangees, de tout le charme d'une amitie inalterable et
inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle a l'ame au doux Pays des Revenants."
* * * * *
Arnoux is mentioned subsequently in one or two of Hearn's letters. He
alludes to suppers eaten with him at Grande Anse, in a little room
opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of
the sea, with the great voice thundering outside so that they could
scarcely hear themselves speak, and the candle in the verrine fluttering
like something afraid.
In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly
after the great eruption of Mt. Pelee that destroyed Saint Pierre, he
alludes to Arnoux' garden, and speaks of a spray of arborescent fern
that had been sent him. In the fragment, also, called "Vanished Light,"
he describes the amber shadows and courtyard filled with flickering
emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. A little boy and girl run to
meet him, and the father's voice, deep and vibrant as the tone of a
great bell, calls from an inner doorway, "Entrez donc, mon ami!" "But
all this was--and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the
streets of that city; never again will its ways be trodden, never again
will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams."
Hearn definitely left Martinique in 1889, bound for America; having
completed the task he had undertaken to do. Much as he loved the lazy,
easy tropical life, "the perfumed peace of enormous azured noons, and
the silent flickering of fire-flies through the lukewarm distance, the
turquoise sky and the beautiful brown women," he began, before the end
of his stay, to acknowledge that the resources of intellectual life were
lacking; no libraries, no books in any language; a mind accustomed to
discipline became, he said, like a garden long uncultivated, in which
rare flowers returned to their primitive savage forms, smothered by
rank, tough growths, which ought to be pulled up and thrown away.
"Nature does not allow serious study or earnest work, and if you revolt
against her, she leaves you helpless and tortured for months. One must
not seek the Holy Ghost, the world is young here,--not old and wise and
grey as in the North.... The material furnished by the tropics could
only," he said, "be utilised in a Northern atmosphere...." The climate
numbed mental life, and the inspiration he hoped for wouldn't come.
During his stay in New York, while preparing "Youma" (a story written in
the West Indies) for press and going over the proofs of "Chita" before
its appearance in book form, he seems to have been in a pitiable state
of destitution, obliged to make a translation of Anatole France's "Le
Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" to keep bread in his mouth.
"So you read my translation of 'Sylvestre Bonnard?'" he says to his
sister, writing from Japan. "I made it in two weeks, the Publishers
paying me only $100. Of course the translation was too quickly done to
be very good. I could not have written it all in the prescribed time, so
a typewriter was hired for me. She was a pretty girl and I almost fell
in love with her."
In 1889, Hearn made that ill-advised visit to Philadelphia, to Dr.
George Milbury Gould. He had only known this gentleman hitherto through
an interchange of letters. Gould had written to him at New Orleans,
expressing delight with some of Hearn's translations from the French,
upon which Hearn, in his usual impulsive way rushed into a
correspondence. This was in April, 1887. Gould had written several
pamphlets on the subject of myopia and defective sight, these he sent to
Hearn, and Hearn had responded, touching, as usual, on every sort of
philosophical and literary subject. When he returned to the United
States, after his two years in the French West Indies, he thought he
would like to consult Gould on the subject of his eyesight. He therefore
wrote, suggesting that if a quiet room could be found for him in
Philadelphia he would try his luck there.
Gould's account of his first appearance in his consulting-room is
familiar to all who have read his book. "The poor exotic was so sadly
out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that he would
certainly have run out of the house if by a tone of voice I had betrayed
any curiosity or a doubt."[20]
[20] "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.
Being extremely hard-up, Hearn was glad to accept an arrangement to stop
in Gould's house for a while, sharing the family meals, but spending the
greater part of the day at work on his proof-correcting in a room set
apart for him. An incident, related by Gould, shows Hearn's
extraordinary shyness and dislike to make the acquaintance of strangers.
He was desirous of giving an idea of the music of Creole songs in his
book on the West Indies, but, because of his ignorance of technical
counterpoint, was unable to do so. Gould made an arrangement with a
lady, an acquaintance, to repeat the airs on her piano as he whistled
them. An appointment was made for a visit, but on their way to the house
Hearn gradually became more and more silent, and his steps slower and
slower. When at last he reached the doorstep and the bell had been rung,
his courage failed, and before the servant appeared he had run, as if
for life, and was half a square away.
Gould claims to have made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character during
the summer he stayed with him at Philadelphia. He declares that he first
gave him a "soul," taught him the sense of duty, and made him appreciate
the beauties of domestic life! A very beautiful story entitled "Karma,"
published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ after Hearn had left for Japan,
certainly shows that a change of some sort was being wrought. "I 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 nature inspires a love that
is 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."
Gould, also, much to the indignation of Hearn's friends, claims to have
been the first person who definitely turned his thoughts to the Far
East. Inasmuch as Hearn's mind had been impregnated with Japan from New
Orleans days, this seems an unlikely statement; but of all unprofitable
things in this world is the sifting of literary wrangles; Hearn's
intimacy with George Milbury Gould has led to lawsuits, recriminations,
and many distasteful and painful episodes between Gould and some of
Hearn's friends. It is as well perhaps, therefore, to go into detail as
little as possible.
A passage occurs in one of Hearn's letters to Ellwood Hendrik which
disposes of the matter. "Of course we shall never see each other again
in this world, and what is the use of being unkind after all?... The
effect is certainly to convince a man of forty-four that the less he has
to do with his fellowmen the better, or, at least, that the less he has
to do with the so-called 'cultured' the better...."
From the city of doctors and Quakers, Hearn wrote several letters to
Miss Bisland, at first entirely formal upon literary subjects. He
couldn't say when he was going to New York, as he was tied up by
business muddle, waiting for information, anxious beyond expression
about an undecided plan, shivering with cold, and longing for the
tropics.
Lights are thrown upon his emotional and intellectual life in letters
written in the autumn to Dr. Gould from New York.
Japan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival
Lowell, entitled "The Soul of the Far East," had just appeared. It
apparently made a profound impression upon Hearn; every word he declared
to be dynamic, as lucid and philosophical as Schopenhauer. All his
former enthusiasm for Japan was aroused, he followed her progress with
the deepest interest. The Japanese constitution had been promulgated in
1889, the first diet had met in Tokyo in 1890, the simultaneous
reconstruction of her army, and creation of a navy, was gradually
placing her in the van of far eastern nations; and, what was more
important to commercial America, her trade had enormously developed
under the new regime.
Harpers, the publishers, came to the conclusion that it would be
expedient to send one of their staff to Tokyo as regular correspondent;
Hearn had succeeded in catching the attention of the public by his story
of "Chita" and "A Midsummer Trip," that had both been published serially
in their magazine. With his graphic and picturesque pen he would
adequately, they thought, fill the post.
In an interview with the managing director he was approached upon the
subject, and, needless to say, eagerly accepted the offer. It was
arranged, therefore, that, accompanied by Charles D. Weldon, one of
Harpers' artists, he was to start in the beginning of the March of 1890
for the Far East.
Little did Hearn realise that the strange land for which he was bound
was to receive him forever, to make him one with its religion, its
institutions, its nationality, and that, as he closed the door of the
publisher's room that day, he was closing the door between himself and
western civilisation forever.