Letters from The Raven (continued 2)

"I wish we could be together somewhere for a pleasant evening chat, hearing in the intervals the office clock, like the sound of a long-legged walker. I wish we could talk over all the hopes and dreams of ideal societies, and the reasons of the failure to realize them. I wish I could tell you about the ideas of Western civilization which are produced by a long sojourn in the Orient. How pleasant to take country walks again! that is, if there be any country left around Cincinnati. How pleasant to read to you strange stories and theories from the Far East! Still, I have become so accustomed to Japanese life that a return to Western ways would not be altogether easy at first. What a pity I did not reach Japan ten years sooner!

"Tell me, if you write again, all pleasant news about old friends. Love to you always, and believe me ever,

"Your extremely bad and ungrateful

"Grey-headed boy,

"Lafcadio Hearn"

Shortly after this long letter came the one written by Hearn's Japanese wife, accompanied by this note:

"Dear Miss Effie: Here is my wife's answer to your most kind letter. She thanks you very much for writing,—says that she knows your papa well, by looking at his photograph, and by hearing me talk of him; she apologizes for not being able to write or speak English; she hopes to see you some day, and to be shown by you some of the wonders of the Western world, about which she knows nothing; she tells you about our little son; and finally says that if she ever comes to America she will bring you some curious memento from Japan. It is all written in the old style of high Japanese courtesy, in which your letter is called 'jewel-pen letter.' Best regards and kindest love for your papa. We are going to leave Kumamoto. Will write again soon.

"Lafcadio Hearn"

In 1895 an accident befell Mr. Watkin, and, upon his request, Mrs. Watkin wrote a letter to the distant friend. Mrs. Watkin was rather timid about it and was dubious about receiving a reply. However, despite this feeling, she enclosed some little verses of hers upon a spiritual theme. In a short time she received the following reply:

"Kobe;—shimoyamatedori, Shichome

"7 Feb. 28, 1895

"Dear Mrs. Watkin: Your kind, sweet letter reached me by last American mail, and gave me all the pleasure you could have desired. But why have you even dreamed of apologizing for writing to me, who love you all, and for whom everything is comprehensible even if not wholly comprehended? All love and good wishes to you. I received the little poem, and liked it. Those mysteries in which you appear to be interested are scarcely mysteries in the Far East: the immaterial world counts here for more than the visible. Perhaps some day I may suddenly drop in upon you all, and talk ghostliness to you,—a new ghostliness, which you may like. Some hints of it appear in a little book of mine, to be issued about the time this letter reaches you,—'Out of the East.'

"I really think I may see you and my dear old Dad again. I may be obliged erelong to return, at least temporarily, to America, to make some money, though my home must be in Japan till my boy grows up a little. He seems to be very strong and bright, and queerly enough he is fair. I have two souls now, which is troublesome; for his every word and cry stirs strange ripples in my own life, and the freedom of being responsible only for oneself is over forever for me. Whether this be for the worse or the better in the eternal order of things, the Gods must decide.

"I should like to see your new home. The other one was very cosy; but perhaps this is even better. What I also want to see is No. 16 Longworth Street, and to hear the ticking of the old clock that used to sound like the steps of a long-legged man walking on pavement. Effie wrote me a dear, pretty letter. Thank her for me. It is just about seven years now since I saw Dad. I suppose he looks now more like Homer than ever. .1 have become somewhat grey, and have crow's-feet around my eyes. Also I have become fat, and disinclined for violent exercise. In other words, I'm getting down the shady side of the hill,—and the horizon before me is already darkening, and the winds blowing out of it, cold. And I am not in the least concerned about the enigmas,—except that I wonder what my boy will do if I don't live to be nearly as old as Dad. Ever with all affectionate regards to him and yourself and Effie,

"Lafcadio Hearn"

In 1896 Mr. Watkin, partially recovered from his injuries, wrote Hearn a letter, and received a last one from him,—a reply in which the writer finally placed the seal upon the finest friendship in his history. Unlike some of his other attempts at prophecy, Hearn's predictions in this last letter failed to come true. He never saw his old friend again, and the old gentleman, at the age of eighty-two, now occupies a room in the Old Men's Home in Cincinnati, counting among his chief treasures the letters which have been here presented.

"Kobe "Nakayamatedori "7-chome "Bangai 16 "May 23,'96

"Dear Old Dad: How nice to get so dear a letter from you! I know the cost to you of writing it, and my dear old father must not imagine that I do not understand why he cannot write often. With his little grey boy it is much the same now: he finds it hard to write letters, and he has very few correspondents. Why, indeed, should he have many? True men are few; and the autograph-hunters, and the scheming class of small publishers, and the people, who want gratis information about commercial matters in Japan are not considered by him as correspondents. They never get any answers. I have two or three dear friends in this world: is not that enough?—you being oldest and dearest. To feel that one has them is much.

"But I must ask many pardons. I fear Miss Effie will not forgive me for not acknowledging ere now the receipt of a photograph, which surprised as much as it pleased me. To think of the little girl having so developed into the fine serious woman! How old it makes me feel! for I remember Miss Effie when she was so little. Please ask her to forgive me. I was away when the photograph came (in Kyoto), and when I returned, lazily put off writing from day to day. There was, however, some excuse for my laziness. I have been very sick with inflammation of the lungs, and am getting well very slowly. But all danger is practically over.

"I see from the kind letter of protest bearing your initials that the idealism which makes love has never gone out of your heart when you think of me. It is all much more real than any materialism; see, you always predicted that I should be able to do something, while extremely practical, materialistic people predicted that I should end in jail or at the termination of a rope. And your prediction seems to have been wiser,—for at last, at last I am attracting a little attention in England.... Also I see (what I did not know before) that some people have been writing horrid things about me. I expected it, sooner or later, as I have been an open enemy of the missionaries; and, besides, the least success in this world must be atoned for. The price is heavy. Those who ignore you when you are nobody find it necessary to hate you when you disappoint their expectations. But if I keep my health I need not care very much. The incident only brought out some of the honey in dear old Dad's heart.

"You ask about my boy. I can best respond by sending his last photo,—nearly three years old now. If I can educate him in France or Italy, it would be better for him, I think. He is very sensitive; and I am afraid of American or English school training for him. I only pray the Gods will spare me till he is eighteen or twenty. I am watching to see what he will develop; if he have any natural gift, I shall try to cultivate only that gift. Ornamental education is a wicked, farcical waste of time. It left me incapacitated to do anything; and I still feel the sorrow of the sin of having dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek, and stuff,... when a knowledge of some one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of so much service. As it is, I am only self-taught; for everything I learned in school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some of the unlearning, dear old Dad!

"I really expect to see you. You are only seventy-two, and hale, and I trust you have long years before you, and that we shall meet. About the business depression, I hear that it is passing and that 'flush times' are in store for the West. This, I trust, will be. Oh, no! I shall not have to look for you 'in the old men's home,'—no, I shall see you in your own home,—and talk queer talk to you.

"For the time being (indeed, for two years) I have lived altogether by literary work, without breaking my little reserves, and it is likely that better things are in store for me. I am anxious for success,—for the boy's sake above all. To have the future of others to make—to feel the responsibilities—certainly changes the face of life. I am always frightened, of course; but I work and hope. That is the best, is it not? Remember me to all kind friends. Ask Effie to forgive my rude silence, and all yours to believe my love and constant remembrance.

"Lafcadio Hearn

"I am a Japanese citizen now (Y. Koizumi),—adopted into the family of my wife. This settles all legal question as to property as well as marriage under Japanese law; and if I die, the Consul can't touch anything belonging to my people."

The rest is silence.

Letters to a Lady

Herewith are presented letters that were the outgrowth of a friendship that probably meant a great deal to Lafcadio Hearn at the time. In speaking of them, one inevitably thinks of Prosper Mérimée's "Lettres à une inconnue." The later missives, too, must for years to come remain "letters to an unknown,"—unknown to all save a few persons. It was only recently that the natural course of events made it at all possible to include them in this collection. Even now the ban of silence is placed on many things we would like to know.

The letters were written during the memorable year 1876, marked by exciting political conventions and an even more exciting national election, and finally by the great Centennial Exposition. At this time Hearn was in his twenty-sixth year. He had been in the United States for nearly six years, and was at the time employed as a reporter on Mr. Murat Halstead's Cincinnati Commercial. Although he did not like this country and was at this time dreaming of returning some day to Europe, he had been trying for years to make a thoroughly competent newspaper reporter of himself. However, we gather from remarks in his letters that he was still regarded as only a minor member of the staff.

Among men his chief friend remained Mr. Watkin. If he had any friends among young women, he has left no record of them. He seems to have been more or less solitary always. He is constantly telling of his constraint in social gatherings, of his inability to appear otherwise than cold to those around him. Life was indeed to him always a curious carnival, in which one must be careful to keep on the mask, to guard the tongue lest one say something redounding to one's injury or discredit.

With such characteristics, we are therefore at a loss to learn how his intimacy with the unknown began. It may have had its origin when some assignment in the line of newspaper duty took him to her home. One fancies the unknown must have had a keen eye for character and ability to discern anything unusual, anything love-worthy, in the ill-dressed, somewhat ill-featured, shy, timid, little youth Hearn was at that time. It had not heretofore been his good fortune to attract. However that may be, the established fact of the friendship remains.

The identity of the unknown is a secret. We are told that she was a woman of culture and refinement; that she was possessed of some wealth; and, finally, that she was many years older than Hearn.

Mérimée has been referred to. The reference is forced upon us by Hearn himself. He mentions those famous "Lettres," and says he feels toward his "Dear Lady" as Mérimée did toward his "inconnue." The comparison is not exact. Indeed, it is rather a case of contrast. Like Mérimée, Hearn's motto seems to have been, with very rare exceptions, "Remember to distrust;" but, unlike Mérimée, Hearn was not a man of wealth and prominence and influence in his native land; unlike Mérimée, Hearn had not had all the advantages wealth and culture can give; unlike Mérimée, he had known, and was still destined to know, hard and bitter years.

With Mérimée, the French stylist par excellence, impersonality was a passion. His was an impersonality that was broken down only in the famous "Lettres." Hearn, on the other hand, could not help injecting much of himself into his books. Nor does the contrast end there.

"For her first thoughts," as Walter Pater well says of the "Lettres" and the author's attitude toward the woman in the case, "Mérimée is always pleading, but always complaining that he gets only her second thoughts,—the thoughts, that is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature."

In the present collection of letters, the rôles are reversed. We gather from the letters that it was Hearn who never let himself go, who always kept himself under cautious restraint, and that it was the woman who resented these second thoughts, these promptings of careful meditations rather than of fresh, warm impulses.

In Mérimée the ardent lover alternated with the severe critic. He quarrelled with the unknown and then had reconciliations, until at last the old love passed away into a form of calm friendship. In the meantime he packed his letters with keen criticisms of books, society, politics, archæology, noted people,—everything that interested a citizen of the world.

In Hearn we have the lonely little egotist, writing mainly about himself. In his appreciation of a woman's friendship and his pride in her cordial admiration, he expands and reveals some part of his own thoughts, beliefs, studies. For the rest, the connection, on his side at least, seems to have been one of platonic friendship. The lady was more or less existing, Hearn being constantly occupied in explaining away what she was quick to fancy were slights.

She would seem to have been even more sensitive than he. To speak plainly, too, there is a note of evasion in his letters; despite his appreciation of her, he seems to have seized upon his newspaper work as an excuse for preventing their friendship becoming something more intimate. He kept things—at least in his letters—upon a very formal plane. He was to the recipient, one fancies, provokingly distant in his "Dear Lady" form of address. There was an ominous sign in the constant reference to letters returned or unopened. Indeed, there finally came the breach that in the nature of things was inevitable, and then all his letters were returned to him.

The young man did not destroy them. Shortly afterwards he departed for the South. It is not a little strange that in all the years in New Orleans that followed—lean years and fat, years of bitter poverty and of comparative prosperity—Hearn preserved this batch of letters intact. When nearing the age of forty and close to that period when he was to sail for Japan, the more or less matured man passed judgment upon the letters of his youth, found them good, and placed them in the keeping of his friend. He told Mr. Watkin to do with the faded missives what he deemed best. In some fashion he would seem to have felt that he was yet destined to accomplish something in the world of literature, and to have proudly thought that some day even these boyish screeds would be eagerly read.

As for these letters, as with most of Hearn's missives, they were for the most part undated,—written hurriedly on any kind of paper, often on mere scraps.

He places himself before us as the "Oriental by birth and half by blood;" as a lad destined for Catholicism, and, instead of that, savagely attacking the religion of his mother. We have hints of the hard measure the world had dealt him and how he felt like a barbarian beyond the pale of polite society. He confesses himself ill at ease among the cultivated classes, and we dimly feel that there were in those years, before he came to Cincinnati, days so bitter that they left a permanent mark. Without religious faith, going to the boyish extreme of lightly attacking Christianity, he imagined himself ready to become a sort of æsthetic pagan, worshipping Venus and the other gods of the antique world. As antagonistic to accepted pulpit teaching, he read Darwin, and pompously and not a little solemnly announced, "I accept Darwin fully."

Perhaps no inconsiderable portion of this paganism was caused by his youthful worship of Swinburne. All young men in the late sixties and early seventies, with an ear for verbal music and magic, were swearing allegiance to the bard of the famous "Poems and Ballads." Indeed, one feels that Hearn would have been a poet himself, had he but been gifted with the faculty of rhyme. Much of the other equipment of the poet was his in abundant measure,—the love of beauty, the love of lovely words, the joy in the manifold things of nature and art.

Speaking of Swinburne brings us to his reading, and we catch a glimpse of that little shelf of treasured books,—Balzacand Gautier and Rabelais in the French; Poe, to be sure; and—strange choice—the poems of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

In these "Letters to a Lady" there is comparatively little discussion of literary subjects, save the mention of the fact that he is reading, always reading. Of literary criticism there is but little. In one letter, indeed, we do get a reference to the character of the Sultana of Aldrich's "Cloth of Gold," but this is a moral rather than a literary discussion. The sign that he was ranging far afield among other men's works, and also the hint of the writer that was to be, is given in little sentences dropped half unconsciously here and there,—sentences that to the student of Hearn's letters seem to be characteristic of his ways of thought, as when he says, "Somehow the ghosts of the letters I write by night laugh in my face by day;" or when he speaks of his horror of crowds and compares it to the terror of the desert camel being urged toward the white walls and shining minarets of the city beyond the desert; or when, curiously enough, he speaks of himself as seeming like a lizard in the July sun, a very similar turn of thought having been employed by Flaubert in one of his letters, which Hearn had probably never read, even though he did once plan a translation from that author.

It is only necessary in conclusion to call attention to one more letter in this section. As a matter of plain prose it would seem that the lady had complained of the coldness and the dubious tone of some of Hearn's letters and had returned them to him. In response he wrote to her a fable of a Sultan and a neighboring Sultana. He told how the Sultana complained of the Sultan's messengers, and how the Sultan committed them to death by fire. The lady was supposed, from this pretty fable, to draw the conclusion that Hearn's letters had been destroyed by their author. From the collection herewith appended, it can be seen that the fabulist availed himself of poetic license.

I

Dear Friend: Your last kind letter makes me in some sort ashamed of my diffidence and coldness. Yet you must be aware how peculiarly I feel myself situated,—constrained, watched everywhere by a hundred eyes that know me, hemmed in with conventionalities of which I only know the value sufficiently to have my nerves on a perpetual strain through fear of breaking them. I am not by nature cold,—quite the reverse, indeed, as many a bitter experience taught me; and I beg you to attribute my manner rather to overcaution than to indifference to the feelings of others. Why, do not we all wear masks in this great carnival mummery of life, in which we all dance and smile disguisedly, until the midnight of our allotted pleasure time comes; and the King-Skeleton commands, "Masks off—show your skulls"? I am afraid you do not understand [me]; or rather, I feel sure you do not wholly,—for you have had little opportunity. You have only seen me on my best behavior; perhaps you might think less of me under other circumstances, but never think me a chilly phantom, though you may occasionally see me only as the Shadow of that which I really am. Have I been rude? Try to forgive my rudeness. It was involuntary.... I think I understood your letters; and I did not form any opinion therefrom, I feel sure, which you would not have liked. I wish I could be less strained and conventional in company. Will try my best to do better. Sincerely,

L. Hearn

II

Dear Friend and Lady (if I may so call you): Do not suppose that when I delay answering one of your kind letters, the tardiness is attributable to neglect: or forgetfulness or inappreciation of your favor. I thoroughly feel—and feel keenly—every kind word or thought you have expressed or felt forme; I have never rendered you, it is true, a single compliment worthy of those I have received,—but only because I was sure that you understood my feelings better than if I had expressed them; I never write altogether as I think, partly because I am not naturally demonstrative, and while capable of more than ordinary sensitive feeling, I have a kind of reluctance to take off what I might term my little mask. Don't hesitate to scold me, as you threaten, should you think I deserve it....

I have been busy all day among noisy crowds of enthusiastic Catholics; and I shudder at the thought of entering a crowd at all times, just as the desert camel shudders when his driver urges him toward the white walls and the shining minarets of a city sparkling beyond the verge of the silent yellow waste. Consequently I was not able to write till late; and even now I am not in a good writing humor. One's skull becomes peopled with Dreams and Fantastic Things just before daybreak; and if you notice aught foolish or absurd in these lines, please attribute them to that weird influence which comes on us all—

"in the dead vast and middle of the night."

I must make one more visit to the Central Police Station ere cockcrow,—poetically speaking.

Sincerely,

Laf. Hearn

III

Cincinnati, Thursday, 27, 1876

Dear Lady: I return by mail the very interesting letters which you kindly left for my perusal; also, the list of Mr.'s collection, whereof I have taken a copy. The other collectors are so slow in preparing their lists that I fear I shall not be able to publish a full account of their contributions to the World's Exposition for several days yet.... I am very thankful for your assistance in obtaining information regarding these things.

As an English subject, and one who feels a kind of home interest in European news, you may feel assured that the letters from beyond the "great water" interested me extremely.

The author gives a pleasant, realistic, and entertaining picture of the brilliant social affair whereof her letter treats; and her account would have done credit to most foreign newspaper correspondents, speaking from a journalistic point of view....

Believe me very respectfully yours,

L. Hearn

IV

There is a fragment in which is taken up the matter of invitations he has refused. It is chiefly interesting because of his expressed desire to return to Europe:

"I daily receive and pay no attention whatever to other invitations, because I know my presence is only desired for journalistic favors; but with you I regret to be unable to accept them quite as much as you could. In speaking of impulses, I refer merely to sudden actions without preparation,—such as your first note of yesterday; or your action on fancying that I had been talking too much; or your becoming vexed at me for what I could not help. You ought to know that I would do anything in my power to please you or to accommodate you....

"Let me also take this opportunity of thanking you for those books again. I have been very much fascinated by one of them and have not only read but re-read it. It is seemingly by some strange fatuity that your little invitations have latterly fallen on busy days. Last week it was all work; and this week I have had a very easy time of it. You looked at me yesterday as if I had done you some injury, and you hated to see me. If you go to Europe, my best wishes go with you. I hope to return there, and leave this country forever some day in the remote future.

"Do not be offended at my letter.

"L. H."

V

In a letter dated "Thursday p. m., 1876" we find him apologizing for some breach of etiquette. He then, as usual, complains of the newspaper man's lot:

"This afternoon I received your kind note. One of the misfortunes of a journalistic existence is the inability of a newspaper man to fulfil an appointment, meet an engagement, or definitely accept an invitation not immediately connected with his round of regular duty, as he may at any moment be ordered to the most outlandish places in the pursuit of news. I think, however, that I may safely accept your kind invitation to dine with you on Sunday at one o'clock p. m., and also to ride out to Avondale. Nothing could give me greater pleasure; the more so as Sunday is an inordinately dull day in the newspaper sphere. I will certainly be on hand unless something very extraordinary should intervene to prevent; and in such event I shall endeavor to inform you beforehand, so as not to cause you any trouble.

"I remain, dear Lady,

"Very respectfully,

"L. Hearn"

VI

Cincinnati, Friday, 1876 DEAR LADY: I very much regret that I should have inadvertently worded my last note in so clumsy a manner as to make it appear that in accepting your kind invitation I was prospectively interested in nothing but "items" and thankful only for the opportunity of obtaining news. In mentioning that I was especially glad to accept your invitation on Sunday, "as it is an especially dull day for news," I simply meant that I would find more leisure time on Sunday than upon any other day in the week; and would thus feel more pleasure in making a call without being worried by office business. I hope you will therefore consider my rudeness the result of hurried writing and clumsy phraseology rather than of deliberate ignorance.

If it be agreeable to you, I will call upon you at 1 p. m. on Sunday as per invitation. I cannot definitely say, however, what I could do in the way of writing an account of other collections than what have already been spoken of, inasmuch as I am, you know, only a reporter in the office, and subject to orders from the City Editor.

As I have not written any letters except of a business character for several years, please to excuse any apparent lack of courtesy in my note. I am apt to say something malapropos without intending. I remain,

Very respectfully yours,

Lafcadio Hearn

VII

Dear Lady: Excuse my tardiness in replying to your kind and, may I say, too complimentary letter; for I scarcely deserve the courteous interest you have expressed in regard to myself. Also let me assure you that you are very much mistaken in fancying that I am so used to all kinds of people as to feel no pleasure in such introductions as that of Sunday evening. The fact is that I was very much pleased; but am so poor a hand at compliments that I feared even to express to Miss —— the pleasure I felt in her songs and playing, to wish you many happy returns of your birthday, or to hint how well I enjoyed the conversation of your lady sister. I have not visited out since I was sixteen,—nine years ago; have led a very hard and extraordinary life previous to my connection with the press,—became a species of clumsy barbarian,—and in short for various reasons considered myself ostracized, tabooed, outlawed. These facts should be sufficient to explain to you that I am not used to all sorts of people,—not to the cultivated class of people at all, and feel all the greater pleasure in such a visit as that referred to....

I have not had time yet to conclude the entertaining volume of travel you kindly sent me, but have read sufficient to interest me extremely. I find a vast number of novel and hitherto unpublished facts,—the results of more than ordinarily keen observation in the work. If I were reviewing the book, I might feel inclined to take issue with the author in respect: to his views concerning the work of the missionaries in Tahiti,—who have been, you know, most severely criticised by radically minded observers; but the writer's pictures are clearly defined, realistic, and powerfully drawn. I must not waste your time, however, with further gossip just now.

Believe me, dear Lady,

Very respectfully yours,

L. Hearn

VIII

Dear Lady: I am not so insusceptible to such pretty flattery as yours, even though I think it undeserved, as to feel otherwise than pleased. Of course I am vain enough to be gratified at anything good said of me by you or your friends. In regard to enjoying music and flowers, I would only say that I love everything beautiful, and can only look at the social, ethical, or natural world with the eyes of a pagan rather than a Christian, revering the heathen philosophy of æsthetic sense; and surely so must all who truly love the antique loveliness of the Antique World, which deified all fair things and worshipped only those beauties of form and sense whereof it brought forth the highest types. But to speak truly, I am afraid of parties; one's nerves are ever on a painful strain in the effort to be agreeable, in the fear of doing something gauche, and in the awful perplexity of searching for compliments which must fall on the ear as vapid and commonplace,—vanity and vexation of spirit. Indeed, I much enjoyed the little party the other night, because it was a home circle; and I did not feel as though people were scrutinizing my face, my manners, my dress, or criticising my words with severe mental criticism, or making the awful discovery that I "had hands" and did not know what to do with them.

I did not tell you when my vacation should commence, because I did not know myself; indeed, I do not yet know. Our vacations generally commence about June, when each one in turn takes a couple or three weeks' travel and rest; but as I am the youngest and freshest (in the sense of inexperience) of the staff, I suppose I will have to wait my turn until the others have decided. Some like to escape the hot weather. I love hot weather,—the hotter the better. I feel always like a lizard in the July sun; and when the juice of the poison plants is thickest and the venomous reptiles most active, then I, too, feel life most enjoyable, as "Elsie Venner" did. Therefore I may have to wait for my vacation till the golden autumn cometh; but I will endeavor to get away so soon as I can, and will let you know just so soon as I know myself.

Very respectfully yours, dear Lady,

Lafcadio Hearn

IX

Cincinnati, May 9, 1876

DEAR LADY: I am at once gratified and surprised to find that my little article should have given you so much pleasure. Had I not been very busy with a mass of matter-of-fact work last evening, I should have done better justice to Mr.——'s splendid collection. That was a very unfortunate mistake of mine in regard to his name, but I shall try to correct it.

In regard to mentioning Mr.——'s name,

I desire to say to you, in strict confidence, that I purposely omitted it for prudential reasons. Newspapers are very jealous of their employés in the matter of giving compliments; and I feared that further mention just at this time might render it all the more difficult for me to do you a reportorial kindness on some future occasion. This may seem odd; but one outside the newspaper circle can have no idea how particular newspaper proprietors are.

With regard to my article, dear Lady, I would say, in reply to your kind query, that you are welcome to use it as you please. I only-regret the lack of time to have improved it before it appeared in the Commercial. My love for things Oriental need not surprise you, as I happen to be an Oriental by birth and half by blood.

I cannot definitely answer you in regard to the prospective country visit, so courteously proposed, until I see you again or hear from you. I fear I shall have to postpone the pleasure until the regular reporters' vacation time,—that is, if it should necessitate absence from duty for any considerable length of time. However, you can explain further when I again have the pleasure of seeing you; and if I can possibly get away, I will be only too glad of so pleasant a holiday.

Very respectfully and gratefully,

L. Hearn

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 acted 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."

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: