Chapter II: The Artist's Apprenticeship (1)

It is more than doubtful if any individual amid the hurrying multitudes swarming in the streets of New York in 1869 and 1870 ever noticed with interest--though many of them must have seen--the shy, shabby boy, Lafcadio Hearn. He was thin to attenuation, for his meals were scant and uncertain; his dress was threadbare, for in all the two years he never possessed enough money to renew the garments he had worn upon landing, and his shabbiness must have been extreme, for he had during the greater part of that period no home other than a carpenter's shop, where a friendly Irish workman allowed him to sleep on the shavings and cook his meals upon the small stove, in return for a little rough book-keeping and running of errands. Yet a few may have turned for a second glance at the dark face and eagle profile of the emaciated, unkempt boy, though unsuspecting that this was one--few in each generation--of those who have dreamed the Dream, and seen the Vision, that here was one of those whom Socrates termed "dæmonic." One who had looked in secret places, face to face, upon the magic countenance of the Muse, and was thereafter vowed to the quest of the Holy Cup wherein glows the essential blood of beauty. One who must follow forever in poverty hard after the Dream, leaving untouched on either hand the goods for which his fellows strove; falling at times into the mire, torn by the thorns that others evade, lost often, and often overtaken by the night of discouragement and despair, but rising again from besmirchments and defacings to follow the vision to the end. It is hard for those who have never laboured wearily after the glimmering feet of the bearer of the Cup, who have never touched even the hem of her garment, to understand the spiritual _possession_ of one under the vow. To them in such a career will be visible only the fantastic or squalid episodes of the quest.

What were the boy's thoughts at this period; what his hopes, his aims, or his intentions it is now impossible to know. Merely to keep life in his body taxed his powers, and while much of his time was spent in the refuge of the public libraries he was often so faint from inanition as to be unable to benefit by the books he sought.

The fourth fragment of the autobiography appears to refer to this unhappy period.

INTUITION

I was nineteen years old, and a stranger in the great strange world of
America, and grievously tormented by grim realities. As I did not know
how to face those realities, I tried to forget them as much as
possible; and romantic dreams, daily nourished at a public library,
helped me to forget. Next to this unpaid luxury of reading, my chief
pleasure was to wander about the streets of the town, trying to find
in passing faces--faces of girls--some realization of certain ideals.
And I found an almost equal pleasure in looking at the photographs
placed on display at the doors of photographers' shops,--called, in
that place and time, "galleries." Picture-galleries they were indeed
for me, during many, many penniless months.

One day, in a by-street, I discovered a new photographer's shop; and
in a glass case, at the entrance, I beheld a face the first sight of
which left me breathless with wonder and delight,--a face incomparably
surpassing all my dreams. It was the face of a young woman wearing,
for head-dress, something that looked like an embroidered scarf; and
this extraordinary head-dress might have been devised for the purpose
of displaying, to artistic advantage, the singular beauty of the
features. The gaze of the large dark eyes was piercing and calm; the
aquiline curve of the nose was clear as the curve of a sword; the
mouth was fine, but firm;--and, in spite of the sensitive delicacy of
this face, there was a something accipitrine about it,--something
sinister and superb, that made me think of a falcon.... For a long,
long time I stood looking at it, and the more I looked, the more the
splendid wonder of it seemed to grow--like a fascination. I thought
that I would suffer much--ever so much!--for the privilege of
worshipping the real woman. But who was she? I dared not ask the owner
of the "gallery;" and I could not think of any other means of finding
out.

I had one friend in those days,--the only fellow countryman whom I
knew in that American town,--a man who had preceded me into exile by
nearly forty years,--and to him I went. With all of my boyish
enthusiasms he used to feel an amused sympathy; and when I told him
about my discovery, he at once proposed to go with me to the
photograph-shop.

For several moments he studied the picture in silence, knitting his
grey brows with a puzzled expression. Then he exclaimed
emphatically,--

"That is not an American."

"What do you think of the face?" I queried, anxiously.

"It is a wonderful face," he answered,--"a very wonderful face. But it
is not an American, nor an English face."

"Spanish?" I suggested. "Or Italian?"

"No, no," he returned, very positively. "It is not a European face at
all."

"Perhaps a Jewess?"--I ventured.

"No; there are very beautiful Jewish faces,--but none like that."

"Then what can it be?"

"I do not know;--there is some strange blood there."

"How can you tell?" I protested.

"Why, I feel it;--I am quite sure of it.... But wait here a moment!--I
know this photographer, and I shall ask him."

And, to my delight, he went in.... Alas! the riddle was not to be
solved so quickly as we had hoped. The owner of the picture said that
he did not know whose portrait it was. He had bought it, with a
number of other "stock-photographs," from a wholesale dealer in
photographic wares. It had been taken in Paris; but the card upon
which it was now mounted did not bear the name of the French
photographer.

Now my friend was a wanderer whose ties with England had been broken
before I was born;--he knew the most surprising things about weird
places and strange peoples, but had long ceased to feel any interest
in the life of the mother country. For that reason, probably, the
picture proved not less of a riddle to him than to me. The
photographer was a young man who had never left his native state; and
his stock-in-trade had been obtained, of course, through an agency. As
for myself, I was hopelessly separated, by iron circumstances, from
that ordered society which seeks its pleasures in art and music and
drama. Otherwise, how easily might I have learned the name of the
marvellous being who had cast that shadow! But many long years went by
before I learned it.

I had then forgotten all about the picture. I was in a Southern city,
hundreds of miles away; and I happened to be leaning on the counter of
a druggist's shop, talking to the druggist, when I suddenly perceived,
in a glass case at my elbow, the very same enigmatic photograph. It
had been pasted, as a label, on the lid of some box of cosmetic. And
again there tingled, through all my blood, the same thrill of wonder
and delight that I had felt as a boy, at the door of that
photographer....

"Excuse me for interrupting you a moment," I exclaimed;--"please tell
me whose face is that."

The druggist glanced at the photograph, and then smiled--as people
smile at silly questions.

"Is it possible that you do not know?" he responded.

"I do not," I said. "Years ago I saw that photograph and I could not
find out whose picture it was."

"You are joking!"

"Really I am not," I said;--"and I very much want to know."

Then he told me--but I need not repeat the name of the great
tragédienne.... At once flashed back to me the memory of my old
friend's declaration:--"_There is some strange blood there._" After
all, he was right! In the veins of that wonderful woman ran the blood
of Indian kings.

* * * * *

What drove him at the end of the two years to endeavour to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, is not clear. The only light to be gathered upon the subject is from the fifth part of the autobiographical fragments, which suggests that he made the journey in an emigrant train and had not money for food upon the way. After thirty years, the clearest memory of that dolorous pilgrimage was of the distress of being misunderstood by the friendly girl who pitied his sufferings. The record of it bears the title of

MY FIRST ROMANCE

There has been sent to me, across the world, a little book stamped, on
its yellow cover, with names of Scandinavian publishers,--names
sounding of storm and strand and surge. And the sight of those names,
worthy of Frost-Giants, evokes the vision of a face,--simply because
that face has long been associated, in my imagination, with legends
and stories of the North--especially, I think, with the wonderful
stories of Björnstjerne Björnson.

It is the face of a Norwegian peasant-girl of nineteen summers,--fair
and ruddy and strong. She wears her national costume: her eyes are
grey like the sea, and her bright braided hair is tied with a blue
ribbon. She is tall; and there is an appearance of strong grace about
her, for which I can find no word. Her name I never learned, and never
shall be able to learn;--and now it does not matter. By this time she
may have grandchildren not a few. But for me she will always be the
maiden of nineteen summers,--fair and fresh from the land of the
_Hrimthursar_,--a daughter of gods and Vikings. From the moment of
seeing her I wanted to die for her; and I dreamed of _Valkyrja_ and of
_Vala_-maids, of _Freyja_ and of _Gerda_....

* * * * *

--She is seated, facing me, in an American railroad-car,--a
third-class car, full of people whose forms have become
indistinguishably dim in memory. She alone remains luminous, vivid:
the rest have faded into shadow,--all except a man, sitting beside me,
whose dark Jewish face, homely and kindly, is still visible in
profile. Through the window on our right she watches the strange new
world through which we are passing: there is a trembling beneath us,
and a rhythm of thunder, while the train sways like a ship in a storm.

An emigrant-train it is; and she, and I, and all those dim people are
rushing westward, ever westward,--through days and nights that seem
preternaturally large,--over distances that are monstrous. The light
is of a summer day; and shadows slant to the east.

The man beside me says:--

"She must leave us to-morrow;--she goes to Redwing, Minnesota.... You
like her very much?--yes, she's a fine girl. I think you wish that you
were also going to Redwing, Minnesota?"

I do not answer. I am angry that he should know what I wish. And it is
very rude of him, I think, to let me know that he knows.

Mischievously, he continues:--

"If you like her so much, why don't you talk to her? Tell me what you
would like to say to her; and I'll interpret for you.... Bah! you must
not be afraid of the girls!"

Oh!--the idea of telling _him_ what I should like to say to her!...
Yet it is not possible to see him smile, and to remain vexed with him.

Anyhow, I do not feel inclined to talk. For thirty-eight hours I have
not eaten anything; and my romantic dreams, nourished with
tobacco-smoke only, are frequently interrupted by a sudden inner
aching that makes me wonder how long I shall be able to remain without
food. Three more days of railroad travel--and no money!... My
neighbour yesterday asked me why I did not eat;--how quickly he
changed the subject when I told him! Certainly I have no right to
complain: there is no reason why he should feed me. And I reflect upon
the folly of improvidence.

Then my reflection is interrupted by the apparition of a white hand
holding out to me a very, very large slice of brown bread, with an
inch-thick cut of yellow cheese thereon; and I look up, hesitating,
into the face of the Norwegian girl. Smiling, she says to me, in
English, with a pretty childish accent:

"Take it, and eat it."

I take it, and devour it. Never before nor since did brown bread and
cheese seem to me so good. Only after swallowing the very last crumb
do I suddenly become aware that, in my surprise and hunger, I forgot
to thank her. Impulsively, and at the wrong moment, I try to say some
grateful words.

Instantly, and up to the roots of her hair, she flushes crimson: then,
bending forward, she puts some question in a clear sharp tone that
fills me with fear and shame. I do not understand the question: I
understand only that she is angry; and for one cowering moment my
instinct divines the power and the depth of Northern anger. My face
burns; and her grey eyes, watching it burn, are grey steel; and her
smile is the smile of a daughter of men who laugh when they are angry.
And I wish myself under the train,--under the earth,--utterly out of
sight forever. But my dark neighbour makes some low-voiced
protest,--assures her that I had only tried to thank her. Whereat the
level brows relax, and she turns away, without a word, to watch the
flying landscape; and the splendid flush fades from her cheek as
swiftly as it came. But no one speaks: the train rushes into the dusk
of five and thirty years ago ... and that is all!

* * * * *

... What _can_ she have imagined that I said?... My swarthy comrade
would not tell me. Even now my face burns again at the thought of
having caused a moment's anger to the kind heart that pitied
me,--brought a blush to the cheek of the being for whose sake I would
so gladly have given my life.... But the shadow, the golden shadow of
her, is always with me; and, because of her, even the name of the land
from which she came is very, very dear to me.

* * * * *

In Cincinnati Hearn eventually found work that enabled him to live, though this did not come immediately, as is proved by an anecdote, related by himself, of his early days there. A Syrian peddler employed him to help dispose of some accumulated wares, sending him out with a consignment of small mirrors. Certainly no human being was more unfitted by nature for successful peddling than Lafcadio Hearn, and at the end of the day he returned to the Syrian with the consignment intact. Setting down his burden to apologize for his failure he put his foot accidentally upon one of the mirrors, and thrown into a panic by the sound of the splintering glass, he fled incontinently, and never saw the merchant again, nor ever again attempted mercantile pursuits.

The first regular work he obtained was as a type-setter and proof-reader in the Robert Clarke Company, where--as he mentions in one of his letters--he endeavoured to introduce reforms in the American methods of punctuation, and assimilate it more closely to the English standards, but without, as he confesses, any success. It was from some of these struggles for typographical changes, undertaken with hot-headed enthusiasm for perfection, that he derived his nickname of "Old Semicolon," given him in amiable derision by his fellows. Mechanical work of this character could not satisfy him long, though the experience was useful to the young artist in words beginning his laborious self-training in the use of his tools. Punctuation and typographical form remained for him always a matter of profound importance, and in one of his letters he declared that he would rather abandon all the royalties to his publisher than be deprived of the privilege of correcting his own proofs; corrections which in their amplitude often devoured in printer's charges the bulk of his profits.

Later he secured, for a brief period, a position as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, at that time librarian of the public library of Cincinnati, and here again he found food for his desires in a free access to the recondite matters to which already his genius was tending; but again he was driven by poverty and circumstance into broader fields, and early in 1874 he was working as a general reporter on the Cincinnati _Enquirer_. His work was of a kind that gave him at first no scope for his talents and must have been peculiarly unsympathetic, consisting of daily market reports, until chance opened the eyes of his employers to his capacity for better things. A peculiarly atrocious crime, still known in Cincinnati annals as the "Tan-yard Murder," had been communicated to the office of the _Enquirer_ at a moment when all the members of the staff, usually detailed to cover such assignments, were absent. The editor calling upon the indifferent gods for some one instantly to take up the matter, was surprised by a timid request from the shy cub-reporter who turned in daily market "stuff," to be allowed to deal with this tragedy, and after some demur, he consented to accept what appeared an inadequate answer from the adjured deities. The "copy" submitted some hours later caused astonished eyebrows, was considered worthy of "scare-heads," and for the nine succeeding days of the life of the wonder, Cincinnati sought ardently the Hoffmannesque story whose poignantly chosen phrases set before them a grim picture that caused the flesh to crawl upon their bones. It was realized at once that the cub-reporter had unsuspected capacities and his talents were allowed expansion in the direction of descriptive stories. One of the most admired of these was a record of a visit to the top of the spire of St. Peter's Cathedral, where hauled in ropes by a steeple-jack to the arms of the cross which crowned it, he obtained a lofty view of the city and returned to write an article that enabled all the town to see the great panorama through his myopic eyes, which yet could bear testimony to colour and detail not obvious to clearer vision.

It was in this year that some trusting person was found willing to advance a small sum of money for the publication of an amorphous little Sunday sheet, professedly comic and satiric, entitled _Ye Giglampz_. H. F. Farny contributed the cartoons, and Lafcadio Hearn the bulk of the text. On June 21st of that year the first number appeared, with the announcement that it was to be "published daily, except week days," and was to be "devoted to art, literature, and satire." The first page was adorned with a Dicky Doylish picture of Herr Kladderadatsch presenting Mr. Giglampz to an enthusiastic public, which showed decided talent, but the full page cartoon, though it may have been amusing when published, is satire turned dry and dusty after the lapse of thirty-two years, and it may be only vaguely discerned now to refer in some way to the question of a third term for President Grant.

The pictures are easily preferable to the text, though no doubt it too has suffered from the desiccation of time, but Lafcadio Hearn was at no time, one might infer, better fitted for satire than for peddling; _Ye Giglampz_ plainly "jooks wi' deefeculty," and the young journalist's views upon art and politics are such as might be expected from a boy of twenty-four.

The prohibition question, the Chicago fire, a local river disaster, and the Beecher scandal are all dealt with by pen and pencil, much clipping from _Punch_ and some translations from the comic journals of Paris fill the columns, and after nine weeks _Ye Giglampz_ met an early and well-deserved death. The only copies of the paper now known to be in existence are contained in a bound volume belonging to Mr. Farny, discovered by him in a second-hand bookshop, with some pencil notes in the margin in Hearn's handwriting. One of these notes records that an advertisement--there were but three in the first number--was never paid for, so presumably this volume, monument of an unfortunate juvenile exploit, was once in Hearn's meagre library, but was discarded when he left Cincinnati.

In the following year Hearn had left the _Enquirer_ and was recording the Exposition of 1876 for the _Gazette_, and in the latter part of that year he was a regular reporter for the _Commercial_.

In 1895--writing to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain--Hearn speaks of John Cockerill, then visiting Japan, and draws an astonishingly vivid picture of the editor who was in command of the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ in the '70's. These occasional trenchant, accurate sketches from life, to be found here and there in his correspondence, show a shrewdness of judgement and coolness of observation which his companions never suspected. He says:--

"I began daily newspaper work in 1874, in the city of Cincinnati, on a paper called the _Enquirer_ edited by a sort of furious young man named Cockerill. He was a hard master, a tremendous worker, and a born journalist. I think none of us liked him, but we all admired his ability to run things. He used to swear at us, work us half to death (never sparing himself), and he had a rough skill in sarcasm that we were all afraid of. He was fresh from the army, and full of army talk. In a few years he had forced up the circulation of the paper to a very large figure and made a fortune for the proprietor, who got jealous of him and got rid of him.... He afterwards took hold of a St. Louis paper,--then of a New York daily, the _World_.... He ran the circulation up to nearly a quarter of a million, and again had the proprietor's jealousy to settle with.... He also built up the _Advertiser_, but getting tired, sold out, and went travelling. Finally, Bennett of the _Herald_ sends him to Japan at, I believe, $10,000 a year.

"I met him here to-day and talked over old times. He has become much gentler and more pleasant, and seems to be very kindly. He is also a little grey. What I have said about him shows that he is no very common person. The man who can make three or four fortunes for other men, without doing the same thing for himself, seldom is. He is not a literary man, nor a well-read man, nor a scholar,--but has immense common sense, and a large experience of life,--besides being, in a Mark-Twainish way, much of a humourist."

Those who knew John Cockerill will find in this portrait not one line omitted which would make for truth and sympathy. One of Hearn's associates of this period, Joseph Tunison, says of his work:--

"In Cincinnati such work was much harder than now, because more and better work was demanded of a man for his weekly stipend than at present.... Had he been then on a New York daily his articles would have attracted bidding from rival managements, but in Cincinnati there was little, if any, encouragement for such brilliant powers as his. The _Commercial_ took him on at twenty dollars a week.... Though he worked hard for a pittance he never slighted anything he had to do.... He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment.... His employers kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper--the night stations--for in that field developed the most sensational events, and he was strongest in the unusual and the startling."

For two years more this was the routine of his daily life. He formed, in spite of his shyness, some ties of intimacy; especially with Joseph Tunison, a man of unusual classical learning, with H. F. Farny, the artist, and with the now well-known musical critic and lecturer, H. E. Krehbiel. Into these companionships he threw all the ardour of a very young man; an ardour increased beyond even the usual intensity of young friendships, by the natural warmth of his feelings and the loneliness of his life, bereft of all those ties of family common to happier fates. In their company he developed a quality of bonhomie that underlay the natural seriousness of his temperament, and is frequently visible in his letters, breaking through the gravity of his usual trend of thought. Absence and time diminished but little his original enthusiasm, as the letters included in this volume will bear testimony, though in later years one by one his early friendships were chilled and abandoned. One of the charges frequently brought against Lafcadio Hearn by his critics in after years was that he was inconstant in his relations with his friends. Mr. Tunison says of him:--

"He had a fashion of dropping his friends one by one, or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing. Whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit would be hard to say, but he never spoke ill of them afterwards. He seemed to forget all about them, though two or three acquaintances of his early years of struggle and privation were always after spoken of with the tenderest regard, and their companionship was eagerly sought whenever this was possible."

The charge of inconstancy is, to those who knew Lafcadio Hearn well, of a sufficiently serious nature to warrant some analysis at this point, while dealing with the subject of his first intimacies, for up to this period he appears to have had no ties other than those, so bitterly ruptured, with the people of his own blood, or the mere passing amities of school-boy life. That many of his closest friendships were either broken abruptly or sank into abeyance is quite true, but the reason for this was explicable in several ways. The first and most comprehensible cause was his inherent shyness of nature and an abnormal sensitiveness, which his early experiences intensified to a point not easily understood by those of a naturally self-confident temperament unqualified by blighting childish impressions. A look, a word, which to the ordinary robust nature would have had no meaning of importance, touched the quivering sensibilities of the man like a searing acid, and stung him to an anguish of resentment and bitterness which nearly always seemed fantastically out of proportion to the offender, and this bitterness was usually misjudged and resented. Only those cursed with similar sensibilities--"as tender as the horns of cockled snails"--could understand and forgive such an idiosyncrasy. It must be remembered that all qualities have their synchronous defects. The nature which is as reflective as water to the subtlest shades of the colour and form of life must of its essential character be subject to rufflement by the lightest breath of harshness or misconception.

Professor Chamberlain, who himself suffered from this tendency to unwarranted estrangement, has dealt with another phase of the matter with a noble sympathy too rare among Hearn's friends. He says, in a letter to the biographer:--

"The second point was his attitude toward his friends,--his quondam friends,--all of whom he gradually dropped, with but very few exceptions. Some I know who were deeply and permanently irritated by this neglect, or ingratitude, as they termed it. I never could share such a feeling, though of course I lamented the severance of connection with one so gifted, and made two or three attempts at a renewal of intercourse, which were met at first by cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing me to desist from further endeavours. The reason I could not resent this was because Lafcadio's dropping of his friends seemed to me to have its roots in that very quality which made the chief charm of his works. I mean his idealism. Friends, when he first made them, were for him more than mere mortal men, they stood endowed with every perfection. He painted them in the beautiful colours of his own fancy, and worshipped them, pouring out at their feet all the passionate emotionalism of his Greek nature. But Lafcadio was not emotional merely; another side of his mind had the keen insight of a man of science. Thus he soon came to see that his idols had feet of clay, and--being so purely subjective in his judgements--he was indignant with them for having, as he thought, deceived him. Add to this that the rigid character of his philosophical opinions made him perforce despise, as intellectual weaklings, all those who did not share them, or shared them only in a lukewarm manner,--and his disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable. For no man living, except himself, idolized Herbert Spencer in his peculiar way; turning Spencer's scientific speculations into a kind of mysticism. This mysticism became a religion to him. The slightest cavil raised against it was resented by him as a sacrilege. Thus it was hardly possible for him to retain old ties of friendship except with a few men whom he met on the plane of every-day life apart from the higher intellectual interests. Lafcadio himself was a greater sufferer from all this than any one else; for he possessed the affectionate disposition of a child, and suffered poignantly when sympathy was withdrawn, or--what amounted to the same--when he himself withdrew it. He was much to be pitied,--always wishing to love, and discovering each time that his love had been misplaced."

To put the matter in its simplest form, he loved with a completeness and tenderness extremely rare among human beings. When he discovered--as all who love in this fashion eventually do--that the objects of his affection had no such tenderness to give in return, he felt himself both deceived and betrayed and allowed the relation to pass into the silence of oblivion.

There is still another facet of this subject which is made clear by some of the letters written in the last years of his life, when he had withdrawn himself almost wholly from intercourse with all save his immediate family. Failing strength warned him that not many more years remained in which to complete his self-imposed task, and like a man who nears his goal with shortening breath and labouring pulse, he let slip one by one every burden, and cast from him his dearest possessions, lest even the weight of one love should hold him back from the final grasp upon the ideal he had so long pursued with avid heart. This matter has been dwelt upon at some length, and somewhat out of due place, but the charge of disloyalty to friendship is a serious one, and a full understanding of the facts upon which it rested is important to a comprehension of the man.

In these early days in Cincinnati, however, no blight had yet come upon his young friendships, and they proved a source of great delight. Krehbiel was already deeply immersed in studies of folk-songs and folk-music,--his collection of which has since become famous,--and Lafcadio threw himself with enthusiasm into similar studies, his natural love for exotic lore rendering them peculiarly sympathetic to his genius. Together they ransacked the libraries for discoveries, and sought knowledge at first hand from wandering minstrels in Chinese laundries, or from the exiles of many lands who gathered in the polyglot slums along the river-banks. In the dedication of "Some Chinese Ghosts" is recorded an echo of one of these experiences, when Krehbiel opened the heart of a reserved Oriental to give up to them all his knowledge, by proving that he himself could play their strange instruments and sing their century-old songs. The dedication runs thus:--

TO MY FRIEND,
HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL,
THE MUSICIAN,
WHO, SPEAKING THE SPEECH OF MELODY UNTO THE
CHILDREN OF TEN-HIA,--
UNTO THE WANDERING TSING-JIN, WHOSE SKINS
HAVE THE COLOUR OF GOLD,--
MOVED THEM TO MAKE STRANGE SOUNDS UPON THE
SERPENT-BELLIED SAN-HIEN;
PERSUADED THEM TO PLAY FOR ME UPON THE
SHRIEKING YA-HIEN;
PREVAILED ON THEM TO SING ME A SONG OF THEIR
NATIVE LAND,--
THE SONG OF MOHLI-WA.
THE SONG OF THE JASMINE-FLOWER.

This dedication is of peculiar interest; "Chinese Ghosts" has been long out of print, and of the few copies issued--nearly the whole edition was destroyed--but a handful still exist. It gives a typical example of the musical, rhythmic prose which the young reporter was endeavouring to master. He had fallen under the spell of the French Romantic school and of their passion for _le mot juste_, of their love for exotic words, of their research for the grotesque, the fantastic, the bizarre. Already out of his tiny income he was extracting what others in like case spent upon comforts or pleasures, to buy dictionaries and thesauri, and was denying himself food and clothes to purchase rare books. The works of Théophile Gautier were his daily companions, in which he saturated his mind with fantasies of the Orient, Spain, and Egypt, refreshing himself after the dull routine of the day's work with endeavours to transliterate into English the strange and monstrous tales of his model, those abnormal imaginations whose alien aroma almost defied transference into a less supple tongue.

His friend Tunison, writing of Hearn at this period, says:--

"But it was impossible for even this slavery of journalism to crush out of him his determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of the morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of columns in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating from Gautier."

These translations--including "Clarimonde," "Arria Marcella," and "King Candaule"--with three others were published in 1882 under the title of the initial tale, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," having been gathered from the "Nouvelles," and the "Romans et Contes." The preface concludes thus:

"It is the artist who must judge of Gautier's creations. To the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, to the lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth,--of the charm of youthful dreams and young passion in its blossoming,--of poetic ambitions and the sweet pantheism that finds all Nature vitalized by the Spirit of the Beautiful,--to such the first English version of these graceful phantasies is offered in the hope that it may not be found wholly unworthy of the original."

Up to this time no translation into English of Gautier's "Contes" had been attempted, and the manuscript sought a publisher in vain for half a dozen years. Later, when the little volume had reached a small but appreciative audience, another English version was attempted by Andrew Lang, but proved an unsuccessful rival, lacking the warmth and fidelity of its predecessor.

Other attempts in the same direction met with no better success, partly, in some cases, because of the reluctance any Anglo-Saxon publisher inevitably feels in issuing works which would encounter no barriers of rigid decorum between themselves and the world of French readers. The youthful artist working in any medium is prone to be impatient of the prejudices of Anglo-Saxon pudency. The beautiful is to him always its own justification for being, and his inexperience makes him unafraid of the nudities of art. The refusal to deal freely with any form of beauty seems to him as bloodlessly pietistic as the priest's excision of "the breasts of the nymphs in the brake." Yet many years after, when the boy had himself become the father of a boy and began to think of his son's future, he said: "What shall I do with him? ... send him to grim Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord?--I am beginning to think that really much of the ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded on the best experience of man under civilization; and I understand lots of things I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."

This unavailing struggle to find an outlet for the expression of something more worthy of his abilities than the sensational side of journalism caused him the deepest discouragement and depression; and his youthful ardour, denied a safe channel for its forces, turned to less healthful instincts. The years in Cincinnati were at times marred by experiments and outbursts, undertaken with bitter enthusiasm for fantastic ethical codes, and finally caused severance of his ties with his employers and the town itself. The tendency of his tastes toward the study of strange peoples and civilizations made him find much that was attractive in "the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, and led him to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study,"--says Joseph Tunison,--"things that were common to these people in their every-day life his vivid imagination transformed into romance."

This led him eventually into impossible experiments, and brought upon him the resentment of his friends. Many years after, in Japan, he referred to this matter in a letter to one of his pupils, and the letter is so illuminative of this matter as to make it desirable to insert it here, though rightly it should be included in the volume dealing with his life in Japan.

DEAR OCHIAI,--I was very happy to get your kind letter, and the
pleasant news it conveyed....

And now that all your trouble is over, perhaps you will sometimes find
it hard not to feel angry with those who ostracized you for so long.
It would at least be natural that you should feel angry with them, or
with some at least. But I hope you will not allow yourself to feel
anger towards them, even in your heart. Because the real truth is that
it was not really your schoolmates who were offended: it only appeared
so. The real feeling against you was what is called a _national_
sentiment,--that jealous love of country with which every man is born,
and which you, quite unknowingly, turned against you for a little
while. So I hope you will love all your schoolmates none the
less,--even though they treated you distantly for so long.

When I was a young man in my twenties, I had an experience very like
yours. I resolved to take the part of some people who were much
disliked in the place where I lived. I thought that those who
disliked them were morally wrong,--so I argued boldly for them and
went over to their side. Then all the rest of the people stopped
speaking to me, and I hated them for it. But I was too young then to
understand. There were other moral questions, much larger than those I
had been arguing about, which really caused the whole trouble. The
people did not know how to express them very well; they only _felt_
them. After some years I discovered that I was quite mistaken--that I
was under a delusion. I had been opposing a great national and social
principle without knowing it. And if my best friends had not got angry
with me, I could not have learned the truth so well,--because there
are many things that are hard to explain and can only be taught by
experience....

Ever very affectionately,
Your old teacher,
LAFCADIO HEARN.

KUMAMOTO, March 27, 1894.

Sick, unhappy, and unpopular, flight to other scenes naturally suggested itself. Mr. Tunison thus describes the influences determining the move to New Orleans, which occurred in 1877:--

"As Hearn advanced in his power to write, the sense of the discomforts of his situation in Cincinnati grew upon him. His body and mind longed for Southern air and scenes. One morning, after the usual hard work of an unusually nasty winter night in Cincinnati, in a leisure hour of conversation he heard an associate on the paper describe a scene in the Gulf State. It was something about an old mansion of an ante-bellum cotton prince, with its white columns, its beautiful avenue of trees; the whitewashed negro quarters stretching away in the background; the cypress and live-oaks hung with moss, the odours from the blossoming magnolias, the songs of the mocking-birds in the early sunlight."

Hearn took in every word of this with great keenness of interest, as was shown by the usual dilation of his nostrils when excited, though he had little to say at the time. It was as though he could see, and hear, and smell the delights of the scene. Not long after on leaving for New Orleans he remarked:--

"I had to go, sooner or later, but it was your description of the sunlight, and melodies, and fragrance, and all the delights with which the South appeals to the senses that determined me. I shall feel better in the South, and I believe I shall do better."

Though nostalgia for Southern warmth had given a purpose to his wanderings, the immediate cause of his leaving the paper on which he was employed in Cincinnati was his assignment to deal with a story of hydrophobia, in which he suspected he had been given some misleading information by his superiors; and though his suspicions were possibly unjust, he announced that he had lost his loyalty to the paper and abruptly quitted it.

It is said that he went first to Memphis on leaving Cincinnati, but no proof of this remains save an anecdote he once related, placing the scene of it in Tennessee.

The question of essential wrong and right being under discussion, his companion advanced the theory that morals varied so much with localities and conditions that it was impossible to decide that there was any act of which one might say that it was essentially wrong or essentially right. After thinking this over in his brooding manner, he said:--

"Yes, there is one thing that is always wrong, profoundly wrong under any conditions."

"And that?" he was asked.

"To cause pain to a helpless creature for one's own pleasure," was his answer; and then, in illustration, continued: "Once I was walking along a road in Tennessee, and I saw a man who seemed intoxicated with rage--for what cause I don't know. A kitten was crossing the road at the moment. It got under the man's feet and tripped him. He caught it up and blinded it and flung it from him with a laugh. The act seemed to soothe his rage. I was not near enough to stop him, but I had a pistol in my pocket--I always carried one then--and I fired four times at him; but, you know my sight is so bad, I missed him." After a few moments he added, "It has always been one of the regrets of my life that I missed."

Sometime in 1877--the time of the year is uncertain--Hearn arrived in New Orleans, and from this date the work of a biographer becomes almost superfluous, for then was begun the admirable series of letters to H. E. Krehbiel, which record the occupations and interests of his life for the next twelve years, setting forth, as no one less gifted than himself could, the impressions he received, the development of his mind, the trend of his studies, the infinite labour by which he slowly built up his mastery of the English tongue and the methods of work which made him eventually one of the great stylists of the Nineteenth Century. These letters make clear, as no comment could adequately do, how unflinchingly he pursued his purpose to become an artist, through long discouragement, through poverty and self-sacrifice; make clear how the Dream never failed to lead him, and how broad a foundation of study and discipline he laid during his apprenticeship for the structure he was later to rear for his own monument. They also disclose, as again no comment could do, the modesty of his self-appreciation, and the essentially enthusiastic and affectionate nature of his character.

The first work he secured in New Orleans was on the staff of the _Daily Item_, one of the minor journals, where he read proof, clipped exchanges, wrote editorials, and occasionally contributed a translation, or some bit of original work in the shape of what came to be known as his "Fantastics." Meanwhile he was rejoicing in the change of residence, for the old, dusty, unpaved squalid New Orleans of the '70's--the city crushed into inanition by war, poverty, pestilence, and the frenzy of carpet-bagger misrule--was far more sympathetic to his tastes than the prosperous growing town he had abandoned.

The gaunt, melancholy great houses where he lodged in abandoned, crumbling apartments,--still decorated with the tattered splendours of a prosperous past,--where he was served by timid unhappy gentlewomen, or their ex-servants; the dim flower-hung courts behind the blank, mouldering walls; the street-cries; the night-songs of wanderers--all the colourful, polyglot, half-tropical life of the town was a constant appeal to the romantic side of the young man's nature. Of disease and danger--arising out of the conditions of the unhappy city--he took no thought till after the great epidemic of yellow fever which desolated New Orleans the following summer, during which he suffered severely from _dengue_, a lighter form of the disease. But even the cruelties of his new home were of value to him. In the grim closing chapter of "Chita" the anguish of a death by yellow fever is set forth with a quivering reality which only a personal knowledge of some phases of the disease could have made possible.

Always pursued by a desire to free himself of the harness of daily journalism, he plunged into experiments in economy, reducing at one time his expenses for food to but two dollars a week; trusting his hardly gathered savings to a sharper who owned a restaurant, and who ran away when the enterprise proved a failure. On another occasion he put by everything beyond his bare necessities in one of the mushroom building-loan societies which sprang up all over the country at that time, and with the collapse of this investment he finally and forever abandoned further financial enterprises, regarding them with an absolutely comic distrust, though for some years he continued to dwell now and then on the possibility of starting second-hand bookshops in hopelessly impossible places--such as the then moribund town of St. Augustine, Florida--and would suggest, with lovably absurd naïveté, that a _shrewd_ man could do well there.

Meanwhile his gluttony for rare books on recondite matters kept him constantly poor, but proved a far better investment, as tools of trade, than his other and more speculative expenditures. Eventually he gathered a library of several hundred volumes and of considerable value, together with an interesting series of scrapbooks containing his earlier essays in literary journalism, and other clippings showing his characteristic _flair_ for the exotic and the strange.

In 1881 he, by great good fortune, was brought into contact with the newly consolidated _Times-Democrat_, a journal whose birth marked one of the earliest impulses towards the regeneration of the long depressed community, and whose staff included men, such as Charles Whitney, Honoré Burthe, and John Augustin, who represented the best impulses toward new growth among both the American and Creole members of the city's population. Of Page M. Baker, the editor-in-chief, he drew in after years this faithful pen-picture:--

"You say my friend writes nicely. He is about the most lovable man I ever met,--an old-time Southerner, very tall and slight, with a singular face. He is so exactly the ideal Mephistopheles that he would never get his photograph taken. The face does not altogether belie the character,--but the mockery is very tender play, and queerly original. It never offends. The real Mephistopheles appears only when there are ugly obstacles to overcome. Then the diabolic keenness with which motives are read and disclosed, and the lightning moves by which a plot is checkmated, or a net made for the plotter himself, usually startle people. He is a man of immense force,--it takes such a one to rule in that community,--but as a gentleman I never saw his superior in grace or consideration. I always loved him--but like all whom I like could never get quite enough of his company for myself."

It was an unusual and delightful coterie of men with whom chance had associated him. Men peculiarly fitted to value his special gifts. Honoré Burthe was the ideal of the "beau sabreur" of romantic French tradition, personally beautiful, brave to absurdity; a soldier of fortune under many flags; withal the pink of gentle courtesy, and a scholar. John Augustin--with less of the "panache"--inherited also the beauty, courage, and breeding of those picturesque ancestors, who had made the French gentleman-adventurers the most ornamental colonists of North America. Charles Whitney, by contrast, had fallen heir to all the shrewd, humorous, amiable vigour of the rival race which had struggled successfully for possession of the great inheritance of America, and which finally met and fused with the Latins in Louisiana.

Among these four rather uncommon types of journalists Lafcadio Hearn found ready sympathy and appreciation, and a chance to develop in the direction of his talents and desires. He was treated by them with courtesy and an indulgent consideration of his idiosyncrasies new in his experience, and was allowed to expand along the natural line of his tastes and capacities, with the result that he soon began to attract attention, and was finally able to find his outlet in the direction to which his preparatory labours and inherent genius were urging him.

He was astonishingly fortunate to have found such companions and such an opportunity. At that period the new journalism was dominant almost everywhere, and perhaps nowhere in the United States, except in New Orleans,--with its large French population and its residuum of the ante-bellum leisurely cultivation of taste, and love of lordly beauties of style,--could he have found an audience and a daily newspaper which eagerly sought, and rewarded to the best of its ability, a type of belles-lettres which was caviare to the general. His first work consisted of a weekly translation from some French writer--Théophile Gautier, Guy de Maupassant, or Pierre Loti, whose books he was one of the first to introduce to English readers, and for whose beautiful literary manner he always retained the most enthusiastic admiration. Long years afterward in Japan he spoke of one of the worst afflictions of a recent illness as having been the fear that he should die without having finished Loti's "L'Inde sans les Anglais," which he was reading when seized by the malady. These translations were usually accompanied--in another part of the paper--by an editorial, elucidatory of either the character and method of the author, or the subject of the paper itself, and these editorials were often vehicles of much curious research on a multitude of odd subjects, such as the famous swordsmen of history, Oriental dances and songs, muezzin calls, African music, historic lovers, Talmudic legends, monstrous literary exploits, and the like; echoes of which studies appear frequently in the Krehbiel and O'Connor letters in this volume.

From time to time he added transferences, and adaptations, or original papers, unsigned, which found a small but appreciative audience, some of whom were sufficiently interested to enquire the identity of the author, and who grew into a local clientèle which always thereafter followed the growth of his fame with warm interest. Among these "Fantastics" and translations was published the whole contents of his three early books--"One of Cleopatra's Nights," "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," and "Some Chinese Ghosts"--but these books were made only of such selections as an ever increasing severity of taste considered worthy of reproduction. Much delightful matter which failed quite to reach this standard lapsed into extinction in the files of the journal. Among these was one which has been recovered by chance from his later correspondence. Replying to a criticism by a friend of the use of the phrase "lentor inexpressible" in a manuscript submitted for judgement, he promises to delete it, speaks of it as a "trick phrase" of his, and encloses the old clipping to show where he had first used it, and adds "please burn or tear up after reading ... this essay belongs to the Period of Gush."

Fortunately his correspondent--as did most of those to whom he wrote--treasured everything in his handwriting, and the fragment which bore--my impression is--the title of "A Dead Love" (the clipping lacks its caption) remains to give an example of some of the work that bears the flaws of his 'prentice hand, before he used his tools with the assured skill of a master:--

... No rest he knew because of her. Even in the night his heart was
ever startled from slumber as by the echo of her footfall; and dreams
mocked him with tepid fancies of her lips; and when he sought
forgetfulness in strange kisses her memory ever came shadowing
between.... So that, weary of his life, he yielded it up at last in
the fevered summer of a tropical city,--dying with her name upon his
lips. And his face was no more seen in the palm-shadowed streets, ...
but the sun rose and sank even as before.

And that vague Something which lingers a little while within the tomb
where the body moulders, lingered and dreamed within the long dark
resting-place where they had laid him with the pious hope--_Que en paz
descanse_!...