Chapter L: Hearn (1)

X

DEAR LADY: If I disappointed you last evening, be sure that I myself was much more disappointed, especially as I had to pass within a stone's throw of your house without going in. I believe that if you only knew how frightfully busy we all are, you would have postponed the invitation until next week, when I shall have some leisure and hope to see you. I had expected up to the last moment to be able to call, if only for an hour; but a sudden appointment put it out of my power. The convention is keeping us all as busy as men can be.

I see you returned my letter. I know it was not a satisfactory one. Somehow the ghosts of the letters I write by night laugh in my face by day. I either talk too freely or write too hurriedly. I will not certainly give your books away, for I prize them highly and am delighted with them. I had thought they were only lent. They now nestle on my book-shelf along with a copy of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," illustrated by Doré, Gautier's most Pre-Raphael and wickedest work, Swinburne, Edgar Poe, Rabelais, Aldrich, and some other odd books which form my library. I generally read a little before going to bed.

I hope to visit your farm indeed, but the journalist is a creature who sells himself for a salary. He is a slave to his master, and must await the course of events.

No; you must not pity me or feel sorry for me. What would you do if I were to write you some of my up-and-down experiences and absurdities? And you cannot be of service to me except I were suddenly to lose everything and not know where to turn. Now I am doing very well, and would be doing better but for an escapade....

Of course I will write you in P--; I should like nothing better, feeling towards you like Prosper Mérimée to his "inconnue." I wish I could make my letters equally interesting.

I do not think that I am unfortunate in life, and yet I have done everything to make me so. If you only knew some of my follies, you would cease perhaps to like me. Some day I will confide some of my oddities to you. But don't think me unfortunate because I am a skeptic.

Skepticism is hereditary on my father's side. My mother, a Greek woman, was rather reverential; she believed in the Oriental Catholicism,--the Byzantine fashion of Christianity which produced such hideous madonnas and idiotic-looking saints in stained glass. I think being skeptical enables one to enjoy life better,--to live like the ancients without thought of the Shadow of Death. I was once a Catholic,--at least, my guardians tried to make me so, but only succeeded in making me dream of all priests as monsters and hypocrites, of nuns as goblins in black robes, of religion as epidemic insanity, useful only in inculcating ethics in coarse minds by main force. Afterwards it often delighted me to force a controversy upon some priest, deny his basis of belief, and find him startled to discover that he could not attempt to establish it logically.

You say, "What else is there" but faith to make life pleasant? Why, the majority of things that faith despises. I fancy if one will only try to analyze the amount of comfort derived from Christianity by himself, he will find the candid answer. Whence come all our arts, our loves, our luxuries, our best literature, our sense of manhood to do and dare, our reverence or respect: for Woman, our sense of beauty, our sense of humanity? Never from Christianity. From the antique faiths, the dead civilizations, the lost Greece and Rome, the warrior-creed of Scandinavia, the Viking's manhood and reverence for woman,--his creator and goddess. Yet all faiths surely have their ends in shaping and perfecting this electrical machine of the human mind, and preparing the field of humanity for a wider harvest of future generations, long after the worms, fed from our own lives, have ceased to writhe about us, as the serpents writhe among the grinning masks of stone on the columns of Persepolis.

How you must be bored by so long a letter!

[_The letter is signed by a drawing of the raven, familiar in the letters to Mr. Watkin._]

XI

DEAR LADY: There once lived an Eastern Sultan who reigned over a city fairer than far Samarcand. He dwelt in a gorgeous palace of the most bizarre and fantastically beautiful Saracenic design,--columns of chalcedony and gold-veined quartz, of onyx and sardonyx, of porphyry and jasper, upheld fretted arches of a fashion lovelier than the arches of the Mosque of Cordova There were colonnades upon colonnades, domes rising above courts where silver fountains sang the songs of the Water-Spirit; here were minarets whose gilded crescents kissed the azure heaven; there were eunuchs, officers, executioners, viziers, odalisques, women graceful of form as undulating flame.

In a neighboring kingdom dwelt a sultry-eyed Sultana,--a daughter of sunrise, shaped of fire and snow, impulsive, generous, and far more potent than the Sultan. Either desired to become the friend of the other, but either feared to cross the line of purple hills which separated the kingdom. But they held communication by messengers. The Sultana's messengers always spoke the truth, yet scarcely spoke plainly, having great faith in diplomatic suggestion rather than in blunt and forcible utterance. The Sultan's messengers, on the other hand, only spoke half of the truth, being fearful lest their words should be overheard by the keen ears of men who desired that no courtesies should be exchanged between their mistress and her neighboring brother. At last the Sultana became wroth with a great wrath at the messengers, forasmuch as they conversed only in enigmas, the Sultana being apparently quite unable to imagine why they should so speak. Therefore the Sultana bound the messengers, stripped them naked, and, placing them in bags, despatched them by a camel caravan to the Sultan, expressing much anger at the conduct of the messengers. The Sultan, being alarmed at the detention of his messengers, knowing their proverbial loquacity, and fearing they had turned traitors, thanked Allah for their return, and swore by the Beard of his Father that ere sunrise they should die the death of cravens, inasmuch as they had not fulfilled their duty satisfactorily. He decided that they should be burnt with fire, and their ashes cast into the waters of the great river--

_"sweeping down_
_Past carven pillars, under tamarisk groves_
_To where the broad sea sparkled."_

"Kara-Mustapha," exclaimed the Sultan to his trusty vizier, "I desire the death of these dogs. May their fathers' graves be everlastingly defiled! Let them be burnt even as we burn the bones of the unclean beast. Let them be consumed in the furnaces of thy kitchen, that my viands may partake of a sweeter flavor." And so they died.

Meanwhile the Sultana repented of her wrath against the messengers, and despatched a sable eunuch in all haste to save them. But the eunuch arrived before midday, while the prince was yet in his harem dreaming of satiny-skinned houris and the flowers of the valley of Nourjahad, the fruits of the golden-leaved vines of Paradise, and the honeyed lips of the daughters of the prophet, which make mad those who kiss them with the madness of furious love. And the prince, being aroused by his favorite odalisque, lifted up his eyes and beheld the eunuch there standing with a message from the Sultana. And reading the message he fell from the tapestried couch upon the floor, exclaiming, "May all the Ghouls devour my father's bones, and may they tear and devour me when next I visit my mother's grave! By the beard of Allah, those messengers are not; they have died the dog's death, and have vanished even as the smoke of a narghile vanisheth." And a soft wind from the sensuous rosy-skied South toyed and caressed the volatile dust of the bones of the messengers; the dust fructified flowers of intoxicating perfume, and the spirit of the messengers melted into the glory of Paradise. There is but one God--Mahomet is his prophet. [_This is signed by a crescent and with L and H interwoven_.]

XII

DEAR LADY: I felt glad for divers reasons on receiving your letter and the little parcel,--firstly, because I felt that you were not very angry at my foolish fable; and secondly, because I always feel happy on having something nice to read. I had already read considerable of Darwin's "Voyages;" but just now I happened to desire a work of just that kind in order to educate myself in regard to certain ethnological points. I accept Darwin fully.

I do not believe in God--neither god of Greece nor of Rome nor any other god. I do indeed revere Woman as the creator, and I respect--yes, I almost believe in--the graceful Hellenic anthropomorphism which worshipped feminine softness and serpentine fascination and intoxicating loveliness in the garb of Venus Anadyomene. Yes, I could almost worship Aphrodite arisen, were there another renaissance of the antique paganism; and I feel all through me the spirit of that exquisite idolatry expressed in Swinburne's ode to "Our Lady of Pain." But I do not believe in Christ or in Christianity,--the former is not a grand character in my eyes, even as a myth; the latter I abhor as antagonistic to art, to nature, to passion, and to justice. As Théophile Gautier wrote, "I have never gathered passionflowers on the rocks of Calvary; and the river which flows from the flank of the Cross, making a crimson girdle about the world, has never bathed me with its waves."

I always take good care of books, and will return these you have so kindly lent me in a week or two.

Dear Lady, I am very anxious to be able to write that I have a week's freedom or a fortnight's holiday; and I promise you to let you know as soon as possible. But as yet I cannot leave my dull office,--the convention keeps us awfully busy. I would see you very often were it possible; but I never have more than a few hours' leisure daily.

XIII

I have still your letter,--I fancied it might be asked for again, but I do not like to return it, dear Lady,--I had rather make a Gheber sacrifice, and immolate Eros, a smiling and willing victim, to the White Lord of Fire.

No, I did not think the Sultana wicked; for I hold naught in human action to be evil save that which brings sorrow or pain to others. But even suppose the Sultana wicked for the sake of argument: her pretty and yet needless apology for the supposed mischief done was so tender, delicate, and uniquely fantastic that it would have earned the pardons supplicated for by ten thousand such peccadilloes. I could not forget it any more than I could forget the curves about the carved lips of the sweet Medicean Venus; it was a psychical blush of which the peculiar ruddiness made one long to see its twin.

This morning I found within my room a perfumed parcel, daintily odorous, containing diverse wonderful things, including a crystal vessel of remarkably peculiar design, very beautiful and very foreign. I thought of filling it with black volcanic wines, choleric and angry wine, in order to stimulate my resolution to the point of chiding the sender right severely. But the style of the vessel forbade; it was ruddily clear in the stained design, and icily brilliant elsewhere; it suggested the cold purity of a northern land,--fresh sea-breezes, fair hair, coolness of physical temperature. I concluded that nothing stronger than good brown ale would look at home therein; and this beverage provoketh good-nature.

I don't know how to reproach the author of this present properly. I shall not attempt it now. But I will certainly beg and entreat that I may not be favored with any more such kindnesses. I don't merit them, and feel the reverse of pleasant by accepting them. Why I don't know, but I never like to get presents some way or other. It is remarkably odd and pretty; so was the letter which accompanied it.

XIV

DEAR LADY: Notwithstanding your threat to leave my letters unopened, I will venture to write you a few lines. I think that you have misjudged me; and while fancying that I was treating you unkindly, you actually treated me somewhat unfairly,--without, of course, intending it. You have a&ed throughout, or nearly so, upon sudden impulse, which was injudicious; and when you found me acting in the opposite extreme, the necessary lack of sympathy in our actions prompted you to believe that I was "heartless." Now I can fully sympathize with your impulsiveness because I have had similar impulses; but I have been forced to control such impulses by the caution learned of unpleasant experiences. I will run no risks that could involve you or me,--especially you. I did not for one instant (and you only asserted the contrary through a spirit of mischievous reproach) think that I could not trust you with my letters. But I could not trust the letters....

I did not accept your last invitation only because I could not: it was of all weeks the busiest. I did not visit your home yesterday, because I had an assignment at the same hour in the east end, for the purpose of examining a smoke-consumer. If you had written me the day before, I could have made proper arrangements to come. You must think me capable of a little meanness to suppose that I would be discourteous enough to desire a _revanche_ for your impulsive expression of an impulse. I understand why you returned my letter, and I could not feel offended.

XV

DEAR LADY: You must not ask me to forgive you, because I have nothing to forgive; and you must not speak of my being angry with you, because I was not angry with you at all. I wrote sharply, and perhaps disagreeably, because I felt that to do so would most speedily relieve you from your embarrassment; and sympathized sufficiently with your error to suffer with you. I entered into your feelings much more thoroughly, I believe, than you had any idea of, and I only deferred writing last night because I was fairly tired out with hard work. I have made many mistakes similar to yours; and felt similar regrets; and felt my face burn as though pricked with ten thousand needles, even when lying in bed in the dark, to think that a friend had betrayed some tender little confidence which might be turned into sinister ridicule. I was very, very sorry to feel that you had suffered similarly.

So, dear Lady, I feel generally very reluctant to unbosom myself on paper, not knowing who might behold the exposition, and sneer at it without being capable of understanding it. We all have two natures,--the one is our every-day garb of mannerism; the other we strived to keep draped, like a snow-limbed statue of Psyche, half guarded from unæsthetic eyes by a semi-diaphanous veil. This veiled nature is delicate as the wings of a butterfly, the gossamer web visible only when the sunlight catches it, or the frost-flowers on a window-pane. It will bear no rude touches--no careless handling. It is tenderer than the mythic blossom which bled when plucked, and its very tenderness enhances its capacity for suffering.

You may hear many things which on the impulse of the moment might affect you unpleasantly; but you need never yield to such an impulse. I am very well known in the city; and you might often hear people speak of me, but you must not think foolish things, or dream annoying dreams therefor....

What a funny little bundle of pretty contradictions your letter is! How can I answer it? By word of pen? No, not at all. I must only say that I like you quite as much--well, at least nearly as much--as you say that you wish. I won't say "quite," because I don't know myself, and how can I yet know you?

IONIKOE

XVI

DEAR LADY,--I remember having once been severely chided by a hoary friend of mine--a white-bearded Mentor--because I had just received a present from a friend, and had impulsively exclaimed, "Do tell me what I shall give him in return!" "Give in return!" quoth Mentor. "What for?--to destroy your little obligations of gratitude?--to insult your friend by practically intimating that you believe he expected something in return? Don't send him anything save thanks." Well, I didn't. But when I received your exquisite little gift this morning, I thought of writing, "How can I return your kindness," &c.; and now, calling my old friend's advice to mind, I shall only say, "Thanks, dear Lady." Still, flowers and me _[sic]_ have so little in common, that much as I love them, I feel I ought not to be near them,--just as one who loves a woman so passionately that his dearest wish is to kiss her footprints; or as Kingsley's Norseman, who threw himself at the feet of the fair-haired priestess, crying, "Trample on me! spit on me! I am not worthy to be trod upon by your feet." Of course this is an extravagant simile; but the nature of a man is so coarse and rude compared with the fragrance and beauty of the flowers, that he feels in a purer atmosphere when they are breathing perfume about him. Flowers do seem to me like ghosts of maidens, like "that maid whom Gwydion made by glamour out of flowers."

Just fancy!--I was smoking a very poor cigar when the basket of blossoms came up to my rooms; and the odor of tobacco in the presence of the flowers seemed sacrilegious. I felt like the toad in Edgar Fawcett's poem. Perhaps you do not know that little poem, as it has not yet been published in book form. So I will quote it; but do not think me sentimental.

"TO A TOAD

"_Blue dusk, that brings the dewy hours_,
_Brings thee, of graceless form in sooth,_
_Dark stumbler at the roots of flowers;_
_Flaccidy inert, uncouth_.

"_Right ill can human wonder guess_
_Thy meaning or thy mission here,_
_Gray lump of mottled clamminess_--
_With that preposterous leer!_

"_But when I see thy dull bulk where_
_Luxurious roses bend and burny_
_Or some slim lily lifts to air_
_Her frail and fragrant urn,_--

"_Of these, among the garden ways_,
_So grim a watcher dost thou seem_
_That I, with meditative gaze_
_Look down on thee and dream_

"_Of thick-lipped slaves, with ebon skin,_
_That squat in hideous dumb repose_
_And guard the drowsy ladies in_
_Their still seraglios_"

And talking of little roses, luxurious roses, I like them because of the fancies they evoke; their leaves and odor seem of kinship to the lips and the breath of a fair woman,--the lips of a woman humid with fresh kisses as the heart of the rose is humid with dews,--lips curled like the petals of the pink flower, recalling those of Swinburne's "Faustine"--

"_Curled lips, long since half kissed away,_
_Still sweet and keen"_

Dear lady, you sent me a very æsthetic present; and I fear I have written you a very sentimental letter. But if you don't want such effusions, you must not send me such flowers. I received your last few lines, and feel much relieved to find I have not offended you by my foolish letter. I cannot sit down late at night without saying something outrageous; and I must be possessed by the Devil of Heterophemy. Very sincerely yours, L. HEARN

Letters of Ozias Midwinter

"After this perhaps you will recognize the signature OZIAS MIDWINTER. It was taken from Wilkie Collins's 'Armadale.'" This brief postal-card message to his friend, Mr. Henry Watkin, written from New Orleans, November 15, 1877, is the valuable clue that leads to a discovery of a vein of work done by Lafcadio Hearn,--work that perhaps in after years he came to scorn, if not to forget. But for this information, imparted to a friend by Hearn himself, the "Letters of Ozias Midwinter" would doubtless lie undisturbed in their dusty tomb,--the files of the newspaper of yester-year. There may be those who will decry this resurrection of forgotten things; who will say it was the hack-work of a starving man; that it were better left undisturbed. They have a right to their opinion. Nevertheless, with due respect: to them, there are things in these letters as good as anything Hearn ever wrote. More than that, they reveal the whole trend of his mind; they foreshadow the things that were to interest him in the West Indies and in Japan,--the little mysteries of life, the poetry of names, the melody of folk-songs, the fascination of old things. The very adoption of the name of Ozias Midwinter is significant. Already at twenty-seven Hearn was too true a critic of real literature to imagine for a moment that "Armadale" was a book that was worth while; but there were things in this practically forgotten story that appealed to him with peculiar force, things that to him seemed almost as if they might have been written concerning himself. Hearn at times felt that his very name was ugly. In "Armadale" we read, "the strangely uncouth name of Ozias Midwinter;" and again: "It is so remarkably ugly that it must be genuine. No sane human being would, assume such a name as Ozias Midwinter."

His diminutive appearance was a sore point with Hearn. "Armadale" depicts Midwinter as "young and slim and under-sized."

There was something foreign-looking about Hearn. His fictional hero was thus described: "His tawny complexion, his large bright brown eyes, and his black beard gave him something of a foreign look.... His dusky hands were wiry and nervous."

Hearn, by reason of the peculiar appearance of his eyes, more often repelled than attracted people. He could therefore sympathize with Midwinter, who says: "I produced a disagreeable impression at first sight. I couldn't mend it afterwards."

A few more quotations will complete the picture and further make clear the fascination this character in a poor novel had for Hearn. The latter was from the start remarkably shy. He avoided the generality of men. For years he had been a failure in life. Everything he had tried had somehow fallen far below his expectations. Indeed, at the very time he was writing the Midwinter letters he was tramping the streets, going from newspaper office to office in New Orleans seeking work. Let us see now how these things in the life of Hearn correspond with the description of Midwinter: "From first to last the man's real character shrank back with a savage shyness from the rector's touch."

And again: "It mattered little what he tried: failure (for which nobody was ever to blame but himself) was sure to be the end of it, sooner or later. Friends to assist him he had none to apply to; and as for relations, he wished to be excused from speaking of them. For all he knew of them they might be dead, and for all they knew he might be dead."

And finally: "Ozias Midwinter at twenty spoke of his life as Ozias Midwinter at seventy might have spoken, with a long weariness of years on him which he had learned to bear patiently."

So much for the pseudonym. Now for the work to which it was attached. In after years, when Hearn had begun to attain a degree of prosperity, he either forgot something of the hard days, or, for some reason known to himself, told a pleasing fiction about them. Thus, in one letter that was made public shortly after his death, he says he went South from Cincinnati on a vacation, saw the blue and gold of Southern days, and determined to abide in such a climate forever. It has already been made clear in his letters to Mr. Watkin that he went South because the _wanderlust_ was upon him, because he had begun to hate Cincinnati, because he felt that he must find more congenial work elsewhere. Whatever enthusiasts in Cincinnati and New Orleans may say now, he was not a good reporter in the present-day acceptance of the term. There was, on his part, a fancy for fine writing, for rhetoric, which the city editors of three decades ago may have admired, but which at present would be most vigorously blue-pencilled. A youthful Hearn to-day would have a rather hard time in Cincinnati, where the cry is for facts and again facts, and then for brevity and then once more for brevity. If Hearn did not come up to the modern standards of newspaper reporting, neither did he come up to the modern ideals of newspaper correspondence. It is probable that few papers to-day would tolerate the particular kind of "news letter" that Hearn sent to the Cincinnati _Commercial_ in the years 1877 and 1878. It was in a day when the telegraph service was not so well developed as at present, and the news letters from Washington, Boston, New York, New Orleans, and London were a regular feature. There are few newspapers to-day which contain letters by men so eminent in after years as two of the _Commercial_ correspondents became,--Hearn and Moncure D. Conway, also for some time a resident of Cincinnati and afterwards correspondent from London.

Few if any of Hearn's "news letters" made any pretence at giving news. As far as the style of them was concerned, they might have been written for his friend Watkin alone, instead of for a great Ohio valley newspaper, catering to a considerable clientèle. He chose what subjects interested him, not what were presumed to interest the readers of the paper. In days when Louisiana's political affairs were still in the turmoil of the reconstruction period, when the North was still keenly watching events in the "rebel" South, Hearn had few if any references to these matters.

As near an approach as any to a news letter was his first one, sent from Memphis, November 6, 1877, when he wrote some "Notes on Forrest's Funeral." In this he related how he saw the funeral of General N. B. Forrest, the great Confederate cavalryman, told some anecdotes of the dead man's bravery and savagery, and gave his ancestry and an outline of his life.

Then he proceeded: "Old citizens of Memphis mildly described him to me as a 'terror.' He would knock a man down upon the least provocation, and whether with or without weapons, there were few people in the city whom he could not worst in a fight. Imagine a man about six feet three inches in height, very sinewy and active, with a vigorous, rugged face, bright grey eyes that almost always look fierce, eyebrows that seem always on the verge of a frown, and dark brown hair and chin beard, with strong inclination to curl, and you have some idea of Forrest's appearance before his last illness. He was, further, one of the most arbitrary, imperious, and determined men that it is possible to conceive of holding a high position in a civilized community. Rough, rugged, desperate, uncultured, his character fitted him rather for the life of the borderer than the planter; he seemed by nature a typical pioneer,--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilization."

This is straightforward and vivid enough. But it was impossible for this dreamer of weird dreams to go through a whole letter in this fashion, and so we have the following, which, well written as it is, would scandalize the modern telegraph editor handling the correspondence: "The same night they buried him, there came a storm. From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader, were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union."

The hustling, bustling Memphis of to-day is a far different place from the decayed, war-stricken town that the vagrant newspaper man saw. Its ruin, its damp days and nights, depressed him. In a letter of November 23, 1877, he recorded his impressions in a way that would doubtless to-day appeal strongly to the memory of the older generation of Memphians, who have not become used to the new order of things:

"The antiquity of the name of Memphis--a name suggesting vastness and ruin--compels something of a reverential feeling; and I approached the Memphis of the Mississippi dreaming solemnly of the Memphis of the Nile. I found the great cotton mart truly Egyptian in its melancholy decay, and not, therefore, wholly unworthy of its appellation. Tenantless warehouses with shattered windows; poverty-stricken hotels that vainly strive to keep up appearances; rows of once splendid buildings, from whose façades the paint has almost all scaled off; mock stone fronts, whence the stucco has fallen in patches, exposing the humble brick reality underneath; dinginess, dirt, and dismal dilapidation greet the eye at every turn. The city's life seems to have contracted about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralyzed. Its commercial pulse appears to beat very feebly. It gives one the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great misfortune beyond hope of recovery. Yet Memphis still handles one fifth of the annual cotton crop,--often more than a million bales in a season,--and in this great branch of commerce the city will always hold its own, though fine buildings crumble and debts accumulate and warehouses lie vacant.... But when rain and white fogs come, the melancholy of Memphis becomes absolutely Stygian: all things wooden utter strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of stucco sweat as in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flows dimly,--a spectral river, a Styx-flood, with pale mists lingering like Shades upon its banks, waiting for that ghostly ferryman, the wind."

In this letter occurred a quaint passage, illustrating at the same time the wide range of Hearn's reading and the curious paths into which he had allowed his mind to stray: "Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of imperial Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and heaped up before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would appear vast enough to have astonished even Elagabalus."

However, brief as was his stay in Memphis, disagreeable as were most of his impressions, he found time to fall in love with one little piece of sculpture, thus charmingly described as "a little nude Venus at the street fountain, who has become all of one dusky greyish-green hue, preserving her youth only in the beauty of her rounded figure and unwrinkled comeliness of face." In this letter he detailed something of his journey down the river, chronicled his delight in the Southern sunsets, and finally arrived at the first of his promised lands: "The daylight faded away, and the stars came out, but that warm glow in the southern horizon only paled so that it seemed a little further off. The river broadened till it looked, with the tropical verdure of its banks, like the Ganges, until at last there loomed up a vast line of shadows, dotted with points of light, and through a forest of masts and a host of phantom-white river boats and a wilderness of chimneys the _Thompson Dean_, singing her cheery challenge, steamed up to the mighty levee of New Orleans."

In his next letter, dated November 26, 1877, he described his first impressions "at the gates of the Tropics." He came across things that reminded him of London and of Paris and evoked memories of his youth:

"Eighteen miles of levee! London, with all the gloomy vastness of her docks and her 'river of ten thousand masts,' can offer no spectacle so picturesquely attractive and so varied in the attraction." And again: "Canal Street, with its grand breadth and imposing façades, gives one recollections of London and Oxford Street and Regent Street." He went to the French market, still one of the great sights of the city, and could not write enough about it:

"The markets of London are less brightly clean and neatly arranged; the markets of Paris are less picturesque." Even a cotton-press seen at the cotton landing was an event to be celebrated. The thing was to him not merely a piece of ingenious machinery; it was something weird, something demoniac: "Fancy a monstrous head of living iron and brass, fifty feet high from its junction with the ground, having jointed gaps in its face like Gothic eyes, a mouth five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw to the mastodon teeth in the upper jaw. The lower jaw alone moves, as in living beings, and it is worked by two vast iron tendons, long and thick and solid as church pillars. The surface of this lower jaw is equivalent to six square feet. The more I looked at the thing, the more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a low roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The titan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed, silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible yawning heads which formed the gates of the teocallis at Palenque, and through whose awful jaws the sacrificial victims passed."

On December 7, 1877, he dived into more serious and even more practical things. This man, to whom colored races were always of the deepest interest, who had prowled around the negro quarters of Cincinnati for songs and melodies and superstitions, around the Chinese laundries for chance discoveries of strange musical instruments from the Orient, after a residence in the South of one month, discussed a question which is still agitating the country and which threatens to trouble it for many years to come,--the negro question. Charles Gayarré of Louisiana had written an article for the _North American Review_ entitled "The Southern Question." Hearn, who certainly cannot be accused of prejudice against colored peoples, agreed with the Southern writer that white supremacy was necessary for Southern peace and prosperity. He felt that the particular menace of the whites was from the mixed breeds, whose black blood had just enough alloy to make them despise the simplicity and faithfulness of the lowly "darky" of the old régime and aspire to more rights and more privileges. Recently a Southern thinker has written a book to show that, in the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, the ten million negroes must be swept aside by the seventy million whites of this land, and finally perish from the face of the earth, as do all the weaker races. Nearly three decades ago Hearn came to the same conclusion,--a conclusion not expressed without some feeling of fondness for the race: "As for the black man, he must disappear with the years. Dependent like the ivy, he needs some strong oak-like friend to cling to. His support has been cut from him, and his life must wither in its prostrate helplessness. Will he leave no trace of his past in the fields made fertile by his mighty labors, no memory of his presence in this fair land he made rich in vain? Ah, yes! the echo of the sweetly melancholy songs of slavery,--the weird and beautiful melodies born in the hearts of the poor, childlike people to whom freedom was destruction."

By the time he sent his next letter, dated December 10, 1877, he had again been wandering about the city. He visited the old Spanish cathedral founded by Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor and Alferez Real of his Most Catholic Majesty. This is the church that is always referred to as the "French cathedral." Hearn described its two ancient tombs,--that of Almonaster, who died in 1708, and then that of the French noble family of De Marigny de Mandeville, scions of which died and were buried there in 1728, 1779, and 1800. Hearn had his own reflections over the matter just as Irving had in Westminster Abbey:

"O Knights of the Ancient Régime, the feet of the plebeians are blotting out your escutcheons; the overthrowers of throned Powers pass by your tombs with a smile of complacency; the callous knees of the poorest poor will erelong obliterate your carven memory from the stone; the very places of your dwelling have crumbled out of sight and out of remembrance. The glory of Versailles has passed away; 'the spider taketh hold with his hands, and is in the palaces of Kings.'"

From musings in the cathedral he passed into a disquisition on language. He held that the French tongue sounded better to him from the mouth of a negro than did the harsher English. Southern speech flows melodiously from the negro's lips, being musically akin to the many-vowelled languages of Africa. The _th's_ and _thr's,_ the difficult diphthongs and guttural _rr's_ of English and German, have a certain rude Northern strength beyond the mastery of Ethiopian lips. He finds that the Louisiana blacks speak a corrupted French, often called "Creole," which is not the Creole of the Antilles. This recalls to him a memory of his childhood in England and gives also a foretaste of what he was to do ten years later, when Harpers gave him a chance to describe what he felt and saw in the French West Indies:

"Yesterday evening, the first time for ten years, I heard again that sweetest of all dialects, the Creole of the Antilles. I had first heard it spoken in England by the children of an English family from Trinidad, who were visiting relatives in the mother country, and I could never forget its melody. In Martinique and elsewhere it has almost a written dialect; the school-children used to study the 'Creole catechism,' and priests used to preach to their congregations in Creole. You cannot help falling in love with it after having once heard it spoken by young lips, unless indeed you have no poetry in your composition, no music in your soul. It is the most liquid, mellow, languid language in the world. It is especially a language for love-making. It sounds like pretty baby-talk; it woos like the cooing of a dove. It seems to be a mixture of French, a little Spanish, and West African dialects,--those negro dialects that are voluminous with vowels. You can imagine how smooth it is from the fact that in West Indian Creole the letter _r_ is never pronounced; and the Europeans of the Indies complain that once their children have learned to speak Creole, it is hard to teach them to pronounce any other language correctly. They will say 'b'ed' for bread and 't'ed' for thread. So that it is a sort of wopsy-popsy-ootsy-tootsy language."

And from this affectionate passage he is led to speak of Creole satires. During the Republican régime in New Orleans after the Civil War there was a witty, bitter, and brilliant French paper called _Le Carillon_, which designated Republicans by a new term, "Radicanailles," which seemed exceedingly satisfying to the proud aristocracy,--this word compounded of "radical" and _"canaille"_ The paper used to print Creole satires. One was on ex-Governor Antoine, in the form of a parody upon "La Fille de Madame Angot." Now Hearn's ambition was to write a sinuous, silvern, poetical prose. He rarely attempted verse. In his better known books on Japan his versions of Japanese songs and poems are in prose. So, too, in these letters all his renderings of the things that attracted him are in prose. Here is his version of the satire just mentioned, redolent as it is of an era of bitterness:

I

"In the old days before the war, I was a slave at Caddo [Parish]. I tilled the earth and raised sweet potatoes and water-melons. Then afterwards I left the plough and took up the razor to shave folks in the street,--white and black, too. But that, that was before the war.

II

"When Banks went up the river (Red River) with soldiers and with cannon, I changed my career. Then I became a runaway slave. I married my own cousin, who is at this hour my wife. She--she attended to the kitchen. I--I sought for honors. But that, that was during the war.

III

"And then afterward in the custom-house men called me Collector; and then Louisiana named me her Senator; and then to show her confidence the people made me Governor and called me His Eminence; and that is what I am at this present hour. And that, that is since the war."

From this, with the inconsequential air of a butterfly, he turned to the subject of the Greeks of New Orleans,--a subject that must have lain near to his heart by reason of the deep love he bore for his Greek mother. Among the New Orleans people he mentioned was one Greek gentleman: "I never met a finer old man. Though more than seventy years of age, his face was still as firmly outlined, as clearly cut, as an antique cameo; its traits recalled memories of old marbles, portraits in stone of Aristophanes and Sophocles; it bespoke a grand blending of cynicism and poetry."

But the sons of Hellas were not all alike satisfactory to his fastidious taste: "There are many Greeks, sailors and laborers, in New Orleans; but I cannot say that they inspire one with dreams of Athens or of Corinth, of Panathenaic processions or Panhellenic games. Their faces are not numismatic; their forms are not athletic. Sometimes you can discern a something national about a Greek steamboatman,--a something characteristic which distinguishes him from the equally swarthy Italian, Spaniard, 'Dago.' But that something is not of antiquity; it is not inspirational. It is Byzantine, and one is apt to dislike it. It reminds one of Taine's merciless criticism of the faces of Byzantine art. But I have seen a few rare Hellenic types here, and among these some beautiful Romaic girls,--maidens with faces to remind you of the gracious vase paintings of antiquity." One would think he had crammed this letter full enough of topics, but he had one more. Throughout his life ghost stories were an obsession with him. They run all through his books on Japan. Three decades ago he lamented: "In these days ghosts have almost lost the power to interest us, for we have become too familiar with their cloudy faces, and familiarity begetteth contempt. An original ghost story is a luxury, and a rare luxury at that."

He then told of a house on Melpomene Street, New Orleans, in which no one could dwell in peace. If a person were so hardy and so skeptical as to move in, he soon found his furniture scattered, and his carpets torn up by invisible hands. Ghostly feet shook the house with their terrible steps; ghostly hands opened bolted doors as if locks did not exist,--so that by and by no one came to live in the old place any more:

"As the years flitted by the goblin of Decay added himself to the number of the Haunters; the walls crumbled, and the floors yielded, and grass, livid and ghastly looking grass, forced its pale way between the chinks of the planks in the parlor. The windows fell into ruin, and the wind entered freely to play with the ghosts, and cried weirdly in the vacant room."

Then one night Chief of Police Leary and six of his most stalwart men determined to stand watch in the building and solve the mystery. They placed candles in one of the rooms, and towards midnight stood in a hollow square, with Chief Leary in the middle, so that he could aid his men to repel an attack from any quarter whatsoever. The ghosts blew out the lighted candles and, to this extent, were commonplace enough. But the next instant they displayed their complete ingenuity and originality by seizing the seven guardians of the peace and hurling them violently against the ceiling. Hearn adds, with a touch of playful humor: "The city of New Orleans would not pay the doctors' bills of men injured while in the discharge of their duty."

By December 17, 1877, he had become interested in the past and present of "Los Criollos," the Creoles, who were to be such a fascinating subject to him when he visited Martinique and other enchanted isles of the Caribbean.

In this first letter on the subject he corrected the common error of speaking of mulattoes, quadroons, and octaroons of Louisiana as Creoles,--a mistake which curiously enough he himself made in his book, "Ghombo Zhebes," several years later. In this letter, however, he correctly pointed out that no person with the slightest taint of negro blood was a Creole, and that the common mistake was made not only in the North, but also often in the South, where they should know better; not only in America, but also in England, France, and Spain, the former mother countries of all the West Indian colonists. "Creole," properly speaking, is the term applied to the pure-blooded offspring of Europeans born in the colonies of South America or the West Indies, to distinguish them from children of mixed blood born in the colonies or of pure blood born in the mother country. In Louisiana, he pointed out that it usually meant they were of French, more rarely of Spanish, descent. He paid a tribute to the Creole society of New Orleans which was made up of the descendants of all the early European settlers: "Something of all that was noble and true and brilliant in the almost forgotten life of the dead South lives here still (its atmosphere is European; its tastes are governed by European literature and the art culture of the Old World)." Hethen quoted some of the poems in the patois of Louisiana and also some from Martinique that he had already picked up.

On December 22 he devoted his attention to "New Orleans in Wet Weather." He had much to say of its dampness and chills and fogs: "Strange it is to observe the approach of one of these eerie fogs on some fair night. The blue deeps above glow tenderly beyond the sharp crescent of the moon; the heavens seem transformed to an infinite ocean of liquid turquoise, made living with the palpitating life of the throbbing stars. In this limpid clearness, this yellow, tropical moonlight, objects are plainly visible at a distance of miles; far sounds come to the ear with marvellous distinctness,--the clarion calls of the boats, the long, loud panting of the cotton-presses, exhaling steaming breath from their tireless lungs of steel.

"Suddenly sounds become fainter and fainter, as though the atmosphere were made feeble by unaccountable enchantment; distant objects lose distinctness; the heaven is cloudless, but her lights, low-burning and dim, no longer make the night transparent, and a chill falls upon the city, such as augurs the coming of a ghost. Then the ghost appears; the invisible makes itself visible; a vast form of thin white mist seems to clasp the whole night in its deathly embrace; the face of the moon is hidden as with a grey veil, and the spectral fog extinguishes with its chill breath the trembling flames of the stars."

Turning his thought to grave matters, he refers to the elevated tombs in the cemeteries, which some irreverently call "bake ovens." Then comes a touch of the playful, familiar enough to those who read the present volume, but rare in his other books: "Fancy being asked by a sexton whether you wished to have the remains of your wife or child deposited in 'one of them bake ovens.'"

Again, with a swift turn of thought and subject, as if in conversation with a friend or as if in a letter to him, he reverts to "Beast Ben Butler" and his needless brutality in having carved on one of the New Orleans statues, Clay's declaration against slavery and Andrew Jackson's famous saying, "Our federal Union: it must be preserved." The sight of Levantine sailors selling fruit in the markets caused him to rhapsodize on the sea, giving the first of those prose poems in which he was to wax almost lyrical in so many of his works: "If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if, in earliest childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, which none can hear without awe, and which no musician can learn; if you have ever watched wonderingly the far sails of the fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of the sunset, or silver under the moon, or golden in the glow of sunrise; if you once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers, and received the Ocean god's christening, the glorious baptism of salt,--then perhaps you know only too well why those sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes within the heart of the land. Twenty years may have passed since your ears last caught the thunder of that mighty ode of hexameters which the sea has always sung and will sing forever,--since your eyes sought the far line where the vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of rolling waters,--since you breathed the breath of the ocean, and felt its clear ozone living in your veins like an elixir. Have you forgotten the mighty measure of that mighty song? Have you forgotten the divine saltiness of that unfettered wind? Is not the spell of the sea strong upon you still?...

"And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the midst of the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea might come upon them in the night, and phantom winds call wildly to them in their sleep, and they might wake to find themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of the breakers."

On December 27, 1877, already deeply interested in the niceties of language, Hearn gave his Cincinnati readers a dissertation upon the curiosities of Creole grammar, and quoted in Creole a weird love-song, said to be of negro origin. He doubted whether it was really composed by a negro, but remarked that its spirit was undoubtedly African. Then he gave the following prose version of this exotic:

"_Since first I beheld you_, _Adele,_
_While dancing the calinda_,
_I have remained faithful to the thought of you;_
_My freedom has departed from me,_
_I care no longer for all other negresses;_
_I have no heart left for them;_--
_You have such grace and cunning:_--
_You are like the Congo serpent._

"_I love you too much, my beautiful one:_--
_I am not able to help it._
_My heart has become just like a grasshopper,--_
_It does nothing but leap._
_I have never met any woman_
_Who has so beautiful a form as yours._
_Your eyes flash flame;_
_Your body has enchained me captive._

"_Ah, you are so like the serpent-of-the-rattles_
_Who knows how to charm the little bird_,
_And who has a mouth ever ready for it_
_Yo serve it for a tomb._
_I have never known any negress_
_Who could walk with such grace as you can_.
_Or who could make such beautiful gestures;_
_Your body is a beautiful doll._

"_When I cannot see you, Adele_,
_I feel myself ready to die;_
_My life becomes like a candle_
_Which has almost burned itself out._
_I cannot then find anything in the world_
_Which is able to give me pleasure_:--
_I could well go down to the river_
_And throw myself in it that I might cease to suffer_.

"_Tell me if you have a man_,
_And I will make an ouanga charm for him:_
_I will make him turn into a phantom_,
_If you will only take me for your husband._
_I will not go to see you when you are cross;_
_Other women are mere trash to me;_
_I will make you very happy_
_And I will give you a beautiful Madras handkerchief._"