Chapter L: Hearn (2)

He freely admitted that the poem was untranslatable, that it lost its weird beauty, its melody, its liquid softness, its languor, when put into English. Then came a characteristic bit in which he displayed the man who dwelt with delight upon the inner meaning of words,--the delight felt only by the artist in language: "I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia? The French have a beautiful verb expressive of this idea,--_serpenter_, 'to serpent,' to curve in changing undulations like a lithe snake. The French artist speaks of the outlines of a beautiful human body as serpenting,' curving and winding like a serpent. Do you not like the word? I think it is so expressive of flowinglines of elegance,--so full of that mystery of grace which puzzled Solomon: 'the way of a serpent upon a rock.'"

On January 7, 1878, came a picture in prose, which now reminds us of William Ernest Henley's "London Voluntary," in which the latter described the splendor of a golden October day in the metropolis of the world. Here is Christmas Eve in New Orleans: "Christmas Eve came in with a blaze of orange glory in the west, and masses of lemon-colored clouds piled up above the sunset. The whole city was filled with orange-colored light, just before the sun went down; and between the lemon-hued clouds and the blue were faint tints of green. The colors of that sunset seemed a fairy mockery of the colors of the fruit booths throughout the city; where the golden fruit lay piled up in luxuriant heaps, and where the awnings of white canvas had been replaced by long archways of interwoven orange branches with the fruit still glowing upon them. It was an Orange Christmas."

Then at nightfall he passed the French opera house on Bourbon Street. It was "dark and dead and silent," and as a matter of course the dreamer had another vision: "Sometimes, when passing under the sharply cut shadows of the building in a night of tropical moonlight, I fancy that a shadowy performance of 'Don Giovanni' or 'Masaniello' must be going on within for the entertainment of a ghostly audience; and that if somebody would but open the doors an instant, one might catch a glimpse of spectral splendor, of dusky-eyed beauties long dead,--of forgotten faces pale with the sleep of battlefields,--of silks that should be mouldering in mouldering chests with the fashions of twenty years ago."

And finally this letter contained the following prophetic utterance concerning the new South,--the South then not yet in existence, the South that so nearly approximates what Hearn said it would be: "It is the picturesqueness of the South, the poetry, the traditions, the legends, the superstitions, the quaint faiths, the family prides, the luxuriousness, the splendid indolence and the splendid sins of the old social system which have passed, or which are now passing, away forever.... The new South may, perhaps, become far richer than the old South; but there will be no aristocracy, no lives of unbridled luxury, no reckless splendors of hospitality, no mad pursuit of costliest pleasures. The old hospitality has been starved to death, and leaves no trace of its former being save the thin ghost of a romance. The new South will be less magnificent, though wealthier; less generous, though more self-denying; less poetical, though more cultured. The new cities will be, probably, more prosperous and less picturesque than the old."

January 14, 1878, Hearn devoted his entire letter to W. C. C. Claiborne, the first American governor of Louisiana. He told in what hostile manner the American was received by the haughty Creole gentry, and how he was alleged to have worn his hat at the theatre. It is in the comment on this that Hearn most amusingly displays himself as an Englishman, with the dim-seeing eyes of a Dickens or a saucy Kipling rather than the clear-headed, clear-eyed American, or the adopted citizen, understanding this country and its people: "I fancy that wearing of the hat before those terribly cultivated and excruciatingly courteous Creole audiences must have been at first a mere oversight; but that poor Claiborne naturally got stubborn when such an outcry was raised about it and, with an angry pride of manhood peculiar to good American blood, swore 'by the Eternal' that he would wear his hat wherever he pleased. Don't you almost wish you could slap him on the shoulder with that truly American slap of approbation?" Of course that is pure Dickens, the Dickens of "American Notes," just as is the following rather amusing description of American newspapers in the good years 1804, 1805, and 1806: "In those days the newspaper seems to have been neither more nor less than a public spittoon,--every man flung his quid of private opinion into it."

Hearn went to look at the Claiborne graves in the old St. Louis cemetery on Basin Street. Throughout his life graveyards seemed to have a fascination for him; but the following description of the St. Louis cemetery is interesting because it proves, what has often been denied, that part of Hearn's boyhood was spent in Wales: "This cemetery is one of the most curious, and at the same time one of the most dilapidated, in the world. I have seen old graveyards in the north of England, and tombs in Wales, where names of the dead of three hundred years ago may yet be read upon the mossy stones; but I have never seen so grim a necropolis as the ruined Creole cemetery at New Orleans. There is no order there, no regularity, no long piles of white obelisks, no even ranks of grey tablets. The tombs seem to jostle one another; the graveyard is a labyrinth in which one may easily lose oneself. Some of the tombs are Roman in size and design; some are mere heaps of broken brick; some are of the old-fashioned table form."

Readers of Hearn's books are familiar with those pages in which he speaks of Japanese female names, and studies appellations in general. This fancy was no new thing with him. As long ago as February 18, 1878, he studied the curious nomenclature of New Orleans streets, revealing, as it does, part of the history of the city, something of its old gallant life, something of its old classical culture. He told how Burgundy Street was named after the great duke; Dauphine is, of course, self-explanatory, as are Louis XV and Royal and Bourbon. Governors are represented by Carondelet, Galvez, and others; French and Spanish piety, by such names as St. Bartholomy, St. Charles, and Annunciata. The classicism, which so affected the traditions of French poetry and the French stage, is here represented by-streets named Calliope, Clio, Dryades, &c. Gallantry, "often wicked gallantry, I fear," is commemorated by a number of streets christened with "the sweetest and prettiest feminine names imaginable,--Adele, Celeste, Suzette, and Annette."

Then he gave his readers some more of those Creole songs he was always collecting, some of which as rich treasure he was afterwards to give to his friend, Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, the musical critic. In this letter he told how, when for the first time he read Daudet's novel, translated under the title of "Sidonie," he was charmed with the refrain of a Creole song, and determined, when in New Orleans, to procure the whole poem. He recorded his disappointment in being able only to get one stanza, which he translated as follows:

"_Others say it is your happiness;_
_I say, it is your sorrow:_
_When we are enchanted by love,_
_Farewell to all happiness!_
_Poor little Miss Zizi!_
_Poor little Miss Zizi!_
_Poor little Miss Zizi!_
_She has sorrow, sorrow, sorrow;_--
_She has sorrow in her heart!"_

Here is another bit, which seems to the Anglo-Saxon very uncouth and unpoetical when given in bare, bald English, robbed of the oft-lisping Creole melody:

_"If thou wert a little bird_,
_And I were a little gun,_
_I would shoot thee--bang!_
_Ah, dear little_
_Mahogany jewel_,
_I love thee as a little pig loves the mud?'_

The next is more charming. It is only a snatch, but it hints delicious romance:

"_Delaide, my queen, the way is too long for me to travel;_-- _That way leads far up yonder._ _But, little as I am, I am going to stem the stream up there._ '_I, Liron, am come,' is what I shall say to them_. '_My queen, good night; 'tis I, Liron, who have come.'"_

And finally there is this one, evidently of negro origin, made to ridicule a mulatto girl named Toucouton, who tried to pass as white:

"_Ah, Toucouton!_
_I know you well:_
_You are like a blackamoor;_
_There is no soap_
_Which is white enough_
_To wash your skin._

"_When the white folks give a ball_,
_You are not able to go there;_
_Ah, how will you be able to play the flirt!_
_You who so love to shine?_
_Ah, Toucouton, &c._

_"Once you used to take a seat_
_Among the fashionable people_;
_Now you must take leave_, _decamps_
_Without any delay whatever_.
_Ah, Toucouton," &c._

We have seen that all these letters by Hearn were as if written for his own pleasure or for the pleasure of a friend, but decidedly not for a newspaper clientèle. After the "news" just referred to, there followed two letters which would seem to indicate that the patient editor besought his correspondent to come nearer to hard, prosaic news matters and treat of the turmoil of Louisiana state affairs. Accordingly, on March 24, 1878, there was a screed on of "Louisiana as It Is," treating of the political questions, and finally another, on March 31, scouting the possibility of forming a Hayes party in Louisiana. These letters were written in so half-hearted a way that it was not at all surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by a new and more ordinary name. Hearn was no longer the representative of the paper. He went on record to the effect that he quit because the paper was slow about paying him money, although he demanded the arrears time and time again. The chances are that the _Commercial's_ readers stupidly wanted more about politics and less about Creole love poetry. With the close of this correspondence Hearn thus definitely closed all connexion with the Cincinnati newspaper world.

We have seen now, from the Midwinter letters, how the Hearn of New Orleans was the father of the Hearn of the West Indies and of Japan. Indeed, so far as his work was concerned, the same subjects interested him throughout his life. This is not to say that he remained at a standstill. On the contrary, he was constantly growing. Despite his bad eyesight, he read incessantly, and his reading took a very wide range. He labored to perfect his style. He struggled with words; he used the file after a fashion to remind one of what Flaubert and Stevenson have told us of themselves. But with a very wise knowledge of his own sympathies and limitations, he chose exactly the topics for his pen that could most surely stir his imagination. It is a little singular, some seven years after his letters to the Cincinnati newspaper, to find him writing practically the same kind of articles and on the same subjects for _Harper's Weekly_. Hearn, then at the age of thirty-five, anxious to have his things appear in some publication with a circulation other than purely local, and anxious likewise to eke out his slender income, managed to secure a commission from the house of Harper. The firm had sent a staff artist to New Orleans to draw sketches of the exposition of 1885. Hearn was to supply the descriptive articles. His first appeared in _Harper's Weekly_ of January 3, 1885, and was a straightforward account of the exposition. Of course with a man of Hearn's temperament this could not last long, so it is not surprising to see the next letter, which appeared on January 10, 1885, devoted to "The Creole Patois."

"Although," he writes, "the pure Creole element is disappearing from the 'Vie Faubon,' as Creole children call the antiquated part of New Orleans, it is there, nevertheless, that the patois survives as a current idiom; it is there one must dwell to hear it spoken in its purity and to study its peculiarities of intonation and construction. The patois-speaking inhabitants, dwelling mostly in those portions of the quadrilateral furthest from the river and from the broad American boundary of Canal Street,--which many of them never cross when they can help it,--are not less bizarre than the architectural background of their picturesque existence. The visitor is surrounded by a life motley-colored as those fantastic populations described in the Story of the Young King of the Black Isles; the African ebon is least visible, but of bronze browns, banana yellows, orange golds, there are endless varieties, paling off into faint lemon tints and even dead silver whites. The paler the shade, the more strongly do Latin characteristics show themselves; and the oval faces, with slender cheeks and low, broad brows, prevail. Sometimes in the yellower types a curious Sphinx visage appears, dreamy as Egypt. Occasionally also one may encounter figures so lithe, so animal, as to recall the savage grace of Piou's 'Satyress.' For the true colorist the contrast of a light saffron skin with dead black hair and eyes of liquid jet has a novel charm, as of those descriptions in the Malay poem, Bida-sari,' of 'women like statues of gold.' It is hard to persuade oneself that such types do not belong to one distinct race, the remnant of some ancient island tribe, and the sound of their richly vowelled Creole speech might prolong the pleasant illusion."

Happening to mention an ocoroon, the very term starts him on a rhapsody:

"That word reminds one of a celebrated and vanished type,--never mirrored upon canvas, yet not less physically worthy of artistic preservation than those amber-tinted beauties glorified in the Oriental studies of Ingres, of Richter, of Gérôme! Uncommonly tall were those famous beauties, citrine-hued, elegant of stature as palmettoes, lithe as serpents; never again will such types reappear upon American soil. Daughters of luxury, artificial human growths, never organized to enter the iron struggle for life unassisted and unprotected, they vanished forever with the social system which made them a place apart as for splendid plants reared within a conservatory. With the fall of American feudalism the dainty glass house was dashed to pieces; the species it contained have perished utterly; and whatever morality may have gained, one cannot help thinking that art has lost something by their extinction. What figures for designs in bronze! What tints for canvas!"

Then Hearn returns to the subject of the Creoles, and speaks of the compilation of Creole proverbs of the Antilles and other places, but of the lack of a similar work in Louisiana. It foreshadowed his own "Ghombo Zhebes," then in the making. Reading his description of the fugitive Creole literature, one regrets that Hearn did not find time and opportunity to collect: it as he did the proverbs.

"The inedited Creole literature," says he, "comprised songs, satires in rhyme, proverbs, fairy tales,--almost everything commonly included under the term of folk-lore. The lyrical portion of it is opulent in oddities, in melancholy beauties; Alphonse Daudet has frequently borrowed therefrom, using Creole refrains in his novels with admirable effect. Some of the popular songs possess a unique and almost weird pathos; there is a strange, naïve sorrow in their burdens, as of children sobbing for lonesomeness in the night. Others, on the contrary, are inimitably comical. There are many ditties or ballads devoted to episodes of old plantation life, to surreptitious frolic, to description of singular industries and callings, to commemoration of events which had strongly impressed the vivid imagination of negroes,--a circus show, an unexpected holiday, the visit of a beautiful stranger to the planter's home, or even some one of those incidents indelibly marked with a crimson spatter upon the fierce history of Louisiana politics."

On January 17, under the same caption, Hearn continued the subject, giving some of the songs and speaking of their probable African ancestry.

On January 31, once more under the general title of "The New Orleans Exposition," Hearn turns with avidity to musings on the Japanese exhibit. Right in the beginning we have this on art, remarkable, as so much of Hearn's work was, for a vivid sense of color and form despite his own difficulty in seeing: "What Japanese art of the best era is unrivalled in--that characteristic in which, according even to the confession of the best French art connoisseurs, it excels all other art--is movement, the rhythm, the poetry of visible motion. Great masters of the antique Japanese schools have been known to devote a whole lifetime to the depiction of one kind of bird, one variety of insect or reptile, alone. This specialization of art, as Ary Renan admirably showed us in a recent essay, produced results that no European master has ever been able to approach. A flight of gulls sweeping through the gold light of a summer morning; a long line of cranes sailing against a vermilion sky; a swallow twirling its kite shape against the disk of the sun; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hoverings of moths or splendid butterflies,--these are subjects the Japanese brush has rendered with a sublimity of realism which might be imitated, perhaps, but never surpassed. Except in the statues of gods or goddesses (Buddhas which almost compel the Christian to share the religious awe of their worshippers, or those charming virgins of the Japanese heaven, 'slenderly supple as a beautiful lily'), the Japanese have been far from successful in delineation of the human figure. But their sculpture or painting of animal forms amazes by its grace; their bronze tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, are not mere copies of nature: they are exquisite idealizations of it."

Almost every paragraph seems to foreshadow some chapter in some one of Hearn's future books on Japan. With a memory of his papers on Japanese inserts, this, written in 1885, is significant:

"Perhaps it is bad taste on the writer's part, but the bugs and reptiles in cotton attracted his attention even more than the cranes. You see a Japanese tray covered with what appear to be dead and living bugs and beetles,--some apparently about to fly away; others with upturned abdomen, legs shrunk up, antennae inert. They are so life-like that you may actually weigh one in your hand a moment before you find that it is made of cotton. Everything, even to the joints of legs or abdomen, is exquisitely imitated: the metallic lustre of the beetle's armor is reproduced by a bronze varnish. There are cotton crickets with the lustre of lacquer, and cotton grasshoppers of many colors: the korogi, whose singing is like to the sound of a weaver, weaving rapidly ('ko-ro-ru, ko-ro-ru'), and the kirigisi, whose name is an imitation of its own note."

Or again, remembering his masterly description of an ascent of the famous Japanese mountain, read this, written long before he had ever seen it in the reality: "Splendid silks were hanging up everywhere, some exquisitely embroidered with attractive compositions, figures, landscapes, and especially views of Fusiyama, the matchless mountain, whose crater edges are shaped like the eight petals of the Sacred Lotos; Fusiyama, of which the great artist Houkousai alone drew one hundred different views; Fusiyama, whose snows may only be compared for pearly beauty to 'the white teeth of a young girl,' and whose summit magically changes its tints through the numberless variations of light. Everywhere it appears,--the wonderful mountain,--on fans, behind rains of gold, or athwart a furnace light of sunset, or against an immaculate blue, or gold burnished by some wizard dawn; in bronze, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke; on porcelain, towering above stretches of vineyard and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud sash of silky, shifting tints, like some beauty of Yosiwara."

At this period in his life there was not only a love of Creole folk-lore and a longing for Japan, but a very decided and deep interest in things Chinese. Not only was Hearn preparing himself for the writing of "Some Chinese Ghosts," but it is altogether probable that his dreams of a trip to Asia contemplated a sojourn in China as well as in Japan. The daintiness, the fairy-like beauty of the Island Empire won him, and China lost its chance for interpretation by a master. However, in his letter of March 7, 1885, telling of "The East at New Orleans," we find this relative to China:

"At either side of the main entrance is a great vase, carved from lips to base with complex designs in partial relief and enamelled in divers colors. In general effect of coloration the display is strictly Chinese; the dominating tone is yellow,--bright yellow, the sacred and cosmogonic color according to Chinese belief. When the Master of Heaven deigns to write, He writes with yellow ink only, save when He takes the lightning for His brush to trace a white sentence of destruction. So at least we are told in the book called Kan-ing p'ien,--the 'Book of Rewards and Punishments,' which further describes the writing of God as being in _tchouen_,--those antique 'seal-characters' now rarely seen except in jewel engraving, signatures stamped on works of art, or inscriptions upon monuments,--those primitive ideographic characters dating back perhaps to that age of which we have no historic record, but of which Chinese architecture, with its strange peaks and curves, offers us more than a suggestion,--the great Nomad Era."

There were only two more of Hearn's letters on the exposition, one on March 14, on Mexico at New Orleans, telling of the wax figures, depicting various Mexican types, and describing the feather-work, imitated from that of the Aztecs; the other, appearing April 11, 1885, telling of the government exhibit. On November 7 he wound up his letters _for Harper's_ by telling something about "The Last of the Voudoos,"--Jean Montanet, or Voudoo John, or Bayou John, who had just died in New Orleans.

On March 28 and April 4 there appeared in _Harper's Bazar,_ some "Notes of a Curiosity Hunter," in which he described some of the things that interested him most in the Japanese and Mexican exhibits.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Letters from The Raven, by Lafcadio Hearn