Lafcadio Hearn, shy, complex, sensuous, has in Elizabeth Bisland a
sympathetic biographer. In her two volumes, the major portion is
devoted to the letters of this exotic and extraordinary writer; he was
both, without being either a great man or a great artist. The dominant
impression made by his personality, so much and often so unhappily
discussed, is itself impressionistic. Curiously enough, as he viewed
the world, so has he been judged by the world. His life, fragmentary,
episodic, restless, doubtless the result of physical and psychical
limitations, is admirably reflected in his writings with their
staccato phrasing, overcoloured style, their flight from anything
approaching reality, their uneasy apprehension of sex, and their
flittings among the folk-lore of a half dozen extinct civilisations.
His defective eyesight was largely the cause of his attitude toward
life and art--for with our eyes we create our world--and his intense
sufferings and consequent pessimism must be set down to the inevitable
tragedy of a soul that greatly aspired, but a soul that had the
interior vision though not the instrument with which to interpret it.
Lafcadio Hearn was a poetic temperament, a stylist, but an incomplete
artist.
His biographer, Miss Bisland, speaks of him as a "stylist."
Unfortunately this is not far from the truth; he was a "stylist,"
though not always with an individual style. The real Hearn had
superimposed upon him the debris of many writers, usually Frenchmen.
He began his literary life as a worshipper and translator of Theophile
Gautier and died in the faith that Pierre Loti had said the last word
of modern prose. Gautier attracted him by his sumptuousness of
epithet, the perfectly realised material splendours of gold, of
marble, of colour. To the neurasthenic Hearn, his brain big with
glorious dreams, the Parisian pagan must have seemed godlike in his
half-smiling, half-contemptuous mastery of language, a mastery in its
ease not outrivalled even by Flaubert. Gautier was a gigantic
reflector of the visible world, but without genuine sympathy for
humanity, and he boasted that his periods, like cats, always fell on
their feet, no matter how high or carelessly he tossed them. And then
he was Greek in his temperament, Greek grafted upon a Parisian who
loved form and hue above all else, and this appealed to Hearn, whose
mother was Greek, whose tastes were exotic. It was only after he had
passed the half-century mark and when he was the father of three sons
that some apprehension of the gravity of Occidental ethical teaching
was realised by him.
When M. Loti-Viaud, that most exquisite of French prose artists and
sentimental sensualists, made his appearance, Lafcadio was ravished
into the seventh heaven. Here was what he had sought to do, what he
never would do--the perfection of impressionism, created by an
accumulation of delicate details, unerringly presented, with the
intention of attacking the visual (literary) sense, not the ear. You
can't read a page of Loti aloud; hearing is never the final court of
appeal for him. Nor is the ear regarded in Hearn's prose. He is not
"auditive"; like Loti and the Goncourts, he writes for the eye.
Fr. Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the predominance des
sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the
dash--he must have studied Poe not too wisely--infinitesimal strokes
of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose
has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the
dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of
the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of
architectonic and the fatal lack of variety, surprise, or grandeur in
the harmonic sense, these disbar the prose of Lafcadio Hearn from the
exalted position claimed for it by his admirers.
Yet it is a delicate prose; the haunted twilight of the soul has found
its notations in his work. With Amiel he could say of a landscape that
it was a state of soul. His very defects became his strength. With
normal eyesight we should not have had the man of ghostly reveries,
the patient, charming etcher on a miniature block of evanescent prose,
the forger of tiny chords, modulating into Chopin-like mist. His mania
for the word caused him to neglect the sentence; his devotion to the
sentence closed for him any comprehensive handling of the paragraph;
he seldom wrote a perfect page; never an entire chapter or book. At
his best he equals Loti in his evocation of the mystery that
encompasses us, a mystery that has been sounded in music, seldom in
language. His cast of mind was essentially romantic. Hearn does not
mention the name of Goncourt in his letters, and yet it is a certain
side of the brothers, the impressionistic side, that his writings
resemble. But he had not their artistry. Nor could he, like
Maupassant, summon tangible spirits from the vasty deep, as did the
Norman master in Le Horla. When Rodin was told by Arthur Symons that
William Blake saw visions, the sculptor, after looking at the
drawings, replied: "Yes, he saw them once; he should have seen them
three or four times." Hearn seldom pinned down to the paper his
dreams, though he had a gift of suggestion, of spiritual overtones, in
a key of transcendentalism, that, in certain pages, far outshines Loti
or Maupassant. Disciple of Herbert Spencer--he was forced because of
his feminine fluidity to lean on a strong, positive brain--hater of
social conventions, despiser of Christianity, a proselyte to a dozen
creeds, from the black magic of Voodooism to Japanese Shintoism, he
never quite rid himself of the spiritual deposits inherited from his
Christian ancestry. This strain, this contradiction, to be found in
his later letters, explains much of his psychology, all of his art. A
man after nearly two thousand years of Christianity may say to
himself: "Lo! I am a pagan." But all the horses from Dan to Beersheba
cannot drag him back to paganism, cannot make him resist the "pull" of
his hereditary faith. The very quality Hearn most deplored in himself
gives his work an exotic savour; he is a Christian of Greek and Roman
Catholic training, a half Greek, half Celt, whole gipsy, masquerading
as an Oriental. The mask is an agreeable one, the voice of the speaker
sweet, almost enticing, but one more mask it is, and therefore not the
real Hearn. He was Goth, not Greek; he suffered from the mystic fear
of the Goth, while he yearned for the great day flame of the classics.
Even his Japonisme was skin-deep.
Miss Bisland relates the uneventful career of Hearn in an unaffected
manner. He was loved by his friends, while he often ran away from
them. Solitary, eccentric, Hearn was an unhappy man. He was born June
27, 1850, on one of the Ionian Isles, Santa Maura, called in modern
Greek, Leokus, or Lafcada, the Sappho Leucadia, promontory and all.
His father was Charles Bush Hearn, of an old Dorsetshire
family--Hearn, however, is a Romany name--and an Irishman. His mother
was Rosa Cerigote, a Greek, whose brothers, it is said, stabbed their
sister's suitor, but she, Isolde-like, nursed him, and he married her.
The marriage was not a happy one. Young Lafcadio drifted to Ireland,
was adopted by a rich aunt of Doctor Hearn's, a Mrs. Brenane, and went
with her to Wales. He is said to have been educated in the north of
France at a Jesuit college. He learned the language there. Later he
was at Ushan, the Roman Catholic college of Durham. His life long he
hated this religion, hated it in a superstitious fashion, and seemed
to have suffered from a sort of persecution mania--he fancied Jesuits
were plotting against him. At school he lost the sight of one eye
through an accident while at play. In 1869 Hearn was five feet three
inches tall, weighed one hundred and thirty-seven pounds, and had a
chest measurement of thirty-six and three-fourths inches. Disappointed
of an expected inheritance--his grandaunt left him nothing--he went to
London with his head full of dreams, but his pockets were empty. In
1869 he landed in New York, penniless, poor in health, half blind,
friendless, and very ambitious.
In this biography you may follow him through the black and coiling
poverty, a mean and bitter life compared with which the career of
Robert Louis Stevenson was the triumphal procession of a Prince
Charming of letters. He landed finally in Cincinnati, where he
secured an unimportant position on _The Enquirer_. His friends at that
time were H. E. Krehbiel, Joseph Tunison, and H. F. Farney, the
artist. His letters, printed in this volume, and ranging from 1877 to
1889, addressed to Mr. Krehbiel, are the most interesting for the
students of Hearn the literary aspirant. He envies the solid
architecture of that music-critic's prose, but realises that it is not
for him--lack of structure is his chief deficiency. But he
passionately admired that quality in others wherein he felt himself
wanting. He was generous to others, not to himself. It is unfortunate
that he studied the prose of the seventeenth century. Mr. Krehbiel
evidently knew of his tone-deafness. Hearn wrote him that he could
listen to Patti after he had read Krehbiel. This proves him to be of
the "literary" type of music lover; music must first be a picture
before it makes a tonal image in the cortical cells. The most
remarkable thing in the Hearn case is his intensity of vision without
adequate optical organs. With infinite pains he pictured life
microscopically. He was for ever excited, his brain clamouring for
food, starving for the substance denied it by lack of normal eyesight.
Hearn sickened of newspaper work, he loathed it, he often declared,
and slipped away to New Orleans. There he found much material for his
exotic cravings. He accumulated an expensive and curious library, for
his was the type of talent that must derive from art, not life. At
Martinique we find him hypnotised by the scenery, the climate, and the
colourful life. He abhorred the cold, he always shivered in New York,
and this tepid, romantic island, with its dreamy days and starry
nights, filled him with languid joy. But he soon discovered that the
making of literature was not possible in such a luxurious atmosphere,
as he did later in Japan, and he returned to the United States. In
1890 he left for the East, never to return. He died at Tokio,
September 26, 1904.
Hearn had an amazing acquaintance with the folk-lore of many nations.
He was perpetually raving over the Finnish, the Voodoo, the Hindu. If
he had gone to Paris instead of to Japan, we should have missed the
impressionism of his Japanese tales, yet he might have found the
artistic solace his aching heart desired. There his style would have
been better grounded; there he would have found solid weapons
fashioned for his ethnical, archaeological, and aesthetical excursions.
Folk-lore is a treacherous byway of literature, and Hearn always
worked in it with old-fashioned tools. As versatile in range as were
his researches, the results are meagre, for he was not a trained
observer nor thinker in any domain. So is it that in his later rovings
among the metaphysics of Spencer and modern thought there is something
feverishly shallow. His judgments of English writers were amateurish.
He called Kipling a great poet, presumably on the strength of his
exotic tang. Sir Edwin Arnold he rated above Matthew Arnold for the
same reason.
In Japan, delicious, malodorous Japan, we leave him to the reader, who
will find in these letters to Henry Edward Krehbiel, Ball, W. D.
O'Connor, Gould, Elizabeth Bisland, Page M. Butler, Basil Hall
Chamberlain, Ellwood Hendrick, and Mitchell McDonald the most
entertaining, self-revealing literary correspondence published since
the death of Robert Louis Stevenson. He interpreted the soul of old
Japan at the critical moment when a new Western one was being assumed
like a formidable carapace. He also warned us of Japan, the new
Japan--though not in a friendly way; he would have been glad to see
Western civilisation submerged by the yellow races.
Shy, complex, sensuous, Hearn is the real Lafcadio Hearn in these
letters. Therein we discover the tenderness, the passion, the capacity
for friendship, the genuine humanity absent in his books. His life,
his art, were sadly misfitted with masks--though Nietzsche says: "All
that is profound loves the mask"; and the symbolism of the Orient
completed the disintegration of his baffling personality.