Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 4

White steamboats, heavily panting under their loads of cotton, came toiling by, and called out to us wild greeting long and shrill, until the pilot opened the lips of our giant boat, and her mighty challenge awoke a thousand phantom voices along the winding sh.o.r.e. Red sank the sun in a sea of fire, and bronze-hued clouds piled up against the light, like fairy islands in a sea of glory, such as were seen, perhaps, by the Adelantado of the Seven Cities.

"Those are not real clouds," said the pilot, turning to the west, his face aglow with the yellow light. "Those are only smoke clouds rising from the sugar mills of Louisiana, and drifting with the evening wind."

The daylight died 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.

The letters descriptive of New Orleans scenes and life deserve republis.h.i.+ng had I s.p.a.ce for them here. In a brief paragraph, a sentence perhaps, almost in a word, is given the photograph, chromatic and vitalized in Hearn's unrivalled picturesque style, of the levees, the s.h.i.+pping, the sugar-landing, the cotton-s.h.i.+pping, the ocean steamers, the strange mixture of peoples from all countries and climes; the architecture, streets, markets, etc. The Vendetta of the Sicilian immigrants is described with a strength and vividness which bear eloquent witness to Hearn's innate pleasure in such themes. There is also shown his beginning the study of Creole character, grammar, and language. A peculiarly striking picture is painted of the new huge cotton-press, as a monster whose jaws open with a low roar to devour the immense bale of cotton and to crush it to a few inches of thickness. I cannot exclude this excerpt:

Do you remember that charming little story, "Pere Antoine's Date-Palm," written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published in the same volume with "Marjorie Daw" and other tales?

Pere Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and died in New Orleans. As a boy, he conceived a strong friends.h.i.+p for a fellow student of about his own age, who, in after years, sailed to some tropical island in the Southern Seas, and wedded some darkly beautiful woman, graceful and shapely and tall as a feathery palm. Pere Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friends.h.i.+p strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also pa.s.sed from the world; but they left a little daughter for some one to take care of.

The good priest, of course, took care of her, and brought her up at New Orleans. And she grew up graceful and comely as her mother, with all the wild beauty of the South. But the child could not forget the glory of the tropics, the bright lagoon, the white-crested sea roaring over the coral reef, the royal green of the waving palms, and the beauty of the golden-feathered birds that chattered among them.

So she pined for the tall palms and the bright sea and the wild reef, until there came upon her that strange homesickness which is death; and still dreaming of the beautiful palms, she gradually pa.s.sed into that great sleep which is dreamless. And she was buried by Pere Antoine near his own home.

By and by, above the little mound there suddenly came a gleam of green; and mysteriously, slowly, beautifully, there grew up towering in tropical grace above the grave, a princely palm. And the old priest knew that it had grown from the heart of the dead child.

So the years pa.s.sed by, and the roaring city grew up about the priest's home and the palm-tree, trying to push Pere Antoine off his land. But he would not be moved. They piled up gold upon his doorsteps and he laughed at them; they went to law with him and he beat them all; and, at last, dying, he pa.s.sed away true to his trust; for the man who cuts down that palm-tree loses the land that it grows upon.

"And there it stands," says the Poet, "in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady, whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamoured. May the hand wither that touches her ungently!"

Now I was desirous above all things to visit the palm made famous by this charming legend, and I spent several days in seeking it. I visited the neighbourhood of the old Place d'Armes--now Jackson Square--and could find no trace of it; then I visited the southern quarter of the city, with its numberless gardens, and I sought for the palm among groves of orange-trees overloaded with their golden fruit, amid broad-leaved bananas, and dark cypresses, and fragrant magnolias and tropical trees of which I did not know the names. Then I found many date-palms. Some were quite young, with their splendid crest of leafy plumes scarcely two feet above the ground; others stood up to a height of thirty or forty feet. Whenever I saw a tall palm, I rang the doorbell and asked if that were Pere Antoine's date-palm. Alas!

n.o.body had ever heard of the Pere Antoine.

Then I visited the ancient cathedral, founded by the pious Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor of New Orleans, one hundred and fifty years ago; and I asked the old French priest whether they had ever heard of the Pere Antoine. And they answered me that they knew him not, after having searched the ancient archives of the ancient Spanish Cathedral.

Once I found a magnificent palm, loaded with dates, in a garden on St. Charles Street, so graceful that I felt the full beauty of Solomon's simile as I had never felt it before: "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree." I rang the bell and made inquiry concerning the age of the tree. It was but twenty years old; and I went forth discouraged.

At last, to my exceeding joy, I found an informant in the person of a good-natured old gentleman, who keeps a quaint bookstore in Commercial Place. The tree was indeed growing, he said, in New Orleans Street, near the French Cathedral, and not far from Congo Square; but there were many legends concerning it. Some said it had been planted over the grave of some Turk or Moor--perhaps a fierce corsair from Algiers or Tunis--who died while sailing up the Mississippi, and was buried on its moist sh.o.r.es. But it was not at all like the other palm-trees in the city, nor did it seem to him to be a date-palm. It was a real Oriental palm; yea, in sooth, such a palm as Solomon spake of in his Love-song of Love-songs.

"I said, I will go up to the palm-tree; I will take hold of the boughs thereof." ...

I found it standing in beautiful loneliness in the centre of a dingy woodshed on the north side of New Orleans Street, towering about forty feet above the rickety plank fence of the yard. The gateway was open, and a sign swung above it bearing the name, "M. Michel." I walked in and went up to the palm-tree. A labourer was sawing wood in the back-shed, and I saw through the windows of the little cottage by the gate a family at dinner. I knocked at the cottage-door, and a beautiful Creole woman opened it.

"May I ask, Madame, whether this palm-tree was truly planted by the Pere Antoine?"

"Ah, Monsieur, there are many droll stories which they relate of that tree. There are folks who say that a young girl was interred there, and it is also said that a Sultan was buried under that tree--or the son of a Sultan. And there are also some who say that a priest planted it."

"Was it the Pere Antoine, Madame?"

"I do not know, Monsieur. There are people also who say that it was planted here by Indians from Florida. But I do not know whether such trees grow in Florida. I have never seen any other palm-tree like it. It is not a date-palm. It flowers every year, with a beautiful yellow blossom the colour of straw, and the blossoms hang down in pretty curves. Oh, it is very graceful! Sometimes it bears fruit, a kind of oily fruit, but not dates. I am told that they make oil from the fruit of such palms."

I thought it looked so sad, that beautiful tree in the dusty woodyard, with no living green thing near it. As its bright verdant leaves waved against the blue above, one could not but pity it as one would pity some being, fair and feminine and friendless in a strange land. "_Oh, c'est bien gracieux_," murmured the handsome Creole lady.

"Is it true, Madame, that the owner of the land loses it if he cuts down the tree?"

"_Mais oui!_ But the proprietors of the ground have always respected the tree, because it is so old, so very old!"

Then I found the proprietor of the land, and he told me that when the French troops first arrived in this part of the country they noticed that tree. "Why," I exclaimed, "that must have been in the reign of Louis XIV!" "It was in 1679, I believe," he answered. As for the Pere Antoine, he had never heard of him. Neither had he heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. So that I departed, mourning for my dead faith in a romance which was beautiful.

Next to his best j.a.panese studies, I suspect it will finally come to recognition that Hearn's greatest service to literature is his magnificent series of translations during the New Orleans years. As a translator there were given him his data by creative minds. His own mental equipment prevented creation, and his clearly set limits as a translator added power to his ability and function as a colourist and word-artist. His was almost a unique expertness of entering into the spirit of his models, refeeling their emotions, reimagining their thought and art, and reclothing it with the often somewhat hard and stiff material of English weaving. All of their spirit philologically possible to be conveyed to us, we may be sure he re-presents. For his was the rare power of the instant, the iridescent, the winged word. I think it was innate and spontaneous with him, a gift of the inscrutable, illogic, and fantastically generous-n.i.g.g.ard Fates. All his studies and conscious efforts were almost unavailing either to hinder or to further its perfection. If to Fate we may not be grateful, we can at least thank the weird lesser G.o.ds of life for the mysterious wonder of the gift. The wealth of loving labour silently offered in the 187 or more translations published in the _Times-Democrat_ is marvellous. Hearn brought to my house the loose cuttings from the files, and we got them into some order in "sc.r.a.pbooks." But the dates of publication and other details are often characteristically wanting. Elsewhere in the present volume the t.i.tles, etc., of the stories are listed. Preceded by those of "One of Cleopatra's Nights," they form a body of literary values which should be rescued from the newspaper files and permanently issued in book-form for the pleasure and instruction of English readers. To do this I have most generously been given permission by Hearn's ever helpful and discriminating friend, Mr. Page M. Baker, editor of the _Times-Democrat_.

Hearn knew well the difficulties of the translator's art. "One who translates for the love of the original will probably have no reward save the satisfaction of creating something beautiful and perhaps of saving a masterpiece from less reverent hands." So anxious was he to do such work that he was willing to pay the publication expenses. As pertinent, I copy an editorial of his on the subject, which was published in the _Times-Democrat_, during the period in which he was so busy as a translator:

The New York _Nation_ has been publis.h.i.+ng in its columns a number of interesting and severe criticisms upon translations from foreign authors. These translations are generally condemned, and with good specifications of reasons,--notwithstanding the fact that some of them have been executed by persons who have obtained quite a popular reputation as translators. One critic dwells very strongly upon the most remarkable weakness of all the renderings in question;--they invariably fail to convey the colour and grace of the original, even when the meaning is otherwise preserved. Speaking of the translators themselves, the reviewer observes: "There is not one _artist_ among them."

All this is very true; but the writer does not explain the causes of this state of affairs. They are many, no doubt;--the princ.i.p.al fact for consideration being that there is no demand for artistic work in translation. And there is no demand for it, not so much because it is rare and unlikely to be appreciated as because it is dear.

Artistic translators cannot afford to work for a song,--neither would they attempt to translate a five-hundred-page novel in three weeks or a month as others do. Again, artistic translators would not care to attach their names to the published translation of a fourth-or fifth-cla.s.s popular novel. Finally, artistic translations do not obtain a ready market with first-cla.s.s American publishers, who, indeed, seldom touch domestic translations of foreign fiction, and depend for their translations of European literature upon transatlantic enterprise. Thus the artistic translator may be said to have no field. He may sell his work to some petty publisher, perhaps, but only at a price that were almost absurd to mention;--and the first-cla.s.s publishers do not care to speculate in American translations at all. We might also add that the translator's task is always a thankless one,--that however superb and laborious his execution, it can never obtain much public notice, nor even so much as public comprehension. The original author will be admired,--the translator unnoticed, except by a few critics.

Moreover, the men capable of making the most artistic translations are usually better employed. The translator of a great French, German, or Italian masterpiece of style, ought, in the eternal fitness of things, to be a man able to write something very artistic in his own tongue. No one seems to doubt that Longfellow was the man to translate Dante,--that Tennyson could parallel Homer (as he has shown by a wonderful effort) in the nineteenth-century English,--that Carlyle re-created Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister"

by his rendering of it,--that Austin Dobson was the first to teach English readers some of the beauties of Gautier's poetry,--that Swinburne alone could have made Francois Villon adopt an English garb which exactly fitted him. But the same readers perhaps never gave a thought to the fact that the works of Flaubert, of Daudet, of Droz, of Hugo, of at least a score of other European writers, call for work of an almost equally high cla.s.s on the part of the translator, and never receive it! What a translation of Daudet could not Henry James give us!--how admirably John Addington Symonds could reproduce for us the Venetian richness of Paul de Saint Victor's style! But such men are not likely to be invited, on either side of the Atlantic, to do such work;--neither are they likely to do it as a labour of love!

A splended translation of Flaubert might be expected from several members of what is called "The New England School;"

but what Boston publisher would engage his favourite literary man in such pursuits? It is really doubtful whether the men most capable of making artistic translations could afford, under any ordinary circ.u.mstances, to undertake much work of the kind, except as a literary recreation. At all events, the English-reading world cannot hereafter expect to obtain its translations from other European languages through the labour of the best writers in its own. The only hope is, that the recklessness shown by publishers in their choice of translators will provoke a reaction, and that such work will be more generously remunerated and entrusted to real experts hereafter.

It is unfortunately true that the translators who work for English publishers are far more competent than those who do similar work in the United States; forasmuch as transatlantic firms are glad to print cheap popular translations, while only inferior American firms care to undertake them. Another obstacle to good translations in the United States is that none of the great literary periodicals will devote s.p.a.ce to them. The English and the French magazines and reviews are less conservative, and some very wonderful translations have been published by them. Artistic translation might be admirably developed in this country by the establishment of a new magazine-policy.

The wise reader, if he is also a sincere friend of Hearn, must wish that the correspondence published had been limited to the first volume. Room aplenty in this could have been made for the dozen valuable paragraphs contained in the second. It is not strange that the letters of Hearn worth saving were written before his departure for j.a.pan. He repeatedly had urged that letter-writing both financially and mentally was expensive to the writer. In j.a.pan he was so incessantly busy, much with his teaching and more with his real literary work, that time and will were wanting for that sort of letters which are of interest to the general reader. The interest of the person addressed is another affair.

The dreary half-thousand pages of the correspondence of the j.a.panese time are most disappointing to one who has been thrilled by almost every page of the incomparable letters to Krehbiel and to a few others.

Besides the two reasons for this which I have suggested, there are others which may perhaps be evident to some judicious readers, but which at this time may scarcely be plainly stated. At present the trees are so thick that the forest cannot be seen, but some day an amused and an amusing smile of recognition and disgust will curl the lips of the literary critic. There are two other considerations which should be held in mind: One of them was brought to me by a correspondent of Hearn who had frequently noted it; sometimes (has it happened before?) Hearn used his "friend" to whom he was writing, as a sort of method of exercising his own fancy, as a gymnastics in putting his imagination through its paces, or for a preliminary sketching in of notes and reminders to be of possible use in later serious work. Moreover, the plan was of service in rewarding his correspondents for their praise and appreciation. Of a far more substantial character were the letters sometimes written in grat.i.tude for money received. Hearn flattered himself, as we know, that he was without "cunning," but there is at least one exquisitely ludicrous letter in existence which shows an inverted proof of it, in the execution of an Indian war-dance, because of "the ways and means"

furnished.

As published, Hearn's letters may be cla.s.sified as follows: To

Krehbiel 1887 (3); 1878 (5); 1879 (2); 1880 (3); 1881 (4); 1882 (4); 1883 (4); 1884 (13); 1885 (8); 1886 (6); 1887 (4) 56 Hart 1882 (3); 1883 (1) 4 Ball 1882 (2); 1883 (4); 1885 (3) 9 O'Connor 1883 (4); 1884 (2); 1885 (2); 1886 (2); 1887 (2) 12 Albee 1883 (1); 1898 (2) 3 Gould 1887 (5); 1888 (4); 1889 (8) 17 Bisland 1887 (8); 1889 (11); 1890 (3); 1900 (1); 1902 (3); 1903 (9); 1904 (1) 36 Tunison 1889 (1) 1 Chamberlain 1890 (7); 1891 (13); 1895 (22) 42 Nis.h.i.+da 1890 (2); 1891 (2); 1892 (2); 1893 (9); 1894 (2); 1895 (3); 1896 (3); 1897 (2) 25 Hirn 1890 (1); 1902 (5); 1903 (1) 7 Baker 1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894 (1); 1895 (3); 1896 (2) 8 Hendrick 1891 (2); 1892 (4); 1893 (10); 1894 (6); 1895 (6); 1896 (9); 1897 (7); 1898 (2); 1902 (2) 48 Otani 1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894 (1); 1897 (1); 1898 (2); 1900 (1) 7 Ochiai 1893 (2); 1894 (2); 1896 (2) 6 McDonald 1897 (10); 1898 (25); 1899 (19) 54 Fenollosa 1898 (3); 1899 (2) 5 Blank 1898 1 Foxwell 1899 2 Yasuchochi 1901 1 Tanabe 1904 1 Crosby 1904 1 Fujisaki 1904 1 --- 347

Besides these, the valuable series of "Letters from a Raven," and the sixteen in the same volume "To a Lady" are noteworthy. The latter are of little value either for biography or literature. But the letters to Watkin are so sincere, often childlike, indeed, that they will be prized by the discriminating. Another admirable series, copies of which I have, is made up of letters to Professor R. Matas, of New Orleans. To these it is hoped will sometime be added those which must exist, to Mr. Alden, who was an early and sincere friend. There are a number of unpublished letters to Gould, and the published ones have been so mutilated that they should be correctly republished. Almost anything written by Hearn before he went to j.a.pan, or in some instances reflecting friends.h.i.+ps and feelings existing before he sailed, may prove of as inestimable value as most letters written thereafter will probably be found valueless.

It is noteworthy that the first series, edited by Miss Bisland, was commenced in 1877, when Hearn was twenty-seven years of age, and that for many years Mr. Krehbiel was almost his sole correspondent. But the inimitable perfection and preciousness of these fifty-six letters! They are well worth all his other set productions, published or burned, of the same years. Many are singly worth all the rest of our letters. Here the dreamer--and a dreamer he always was until he got out of his coc.o.o.n--was sincere, hopeful, planful, as playful as his sombre mind would permit, but always magnificently, even startlingly, unreserved.

Remembering that Hearn's mind was essentially an echoing and a colouring mechanism, it is at once a glorious tribute to, and a superlative merit of Mr. Krehbiel to have given the primary and stimulating voice to the always listening dreamer. To have swerved him out of his predestined role so much as to make these pages so astonis.h.i.+ngly full of _musical_ reverberations, is a tribute to his own musical enthusiasm and power as it is also a demonstration of the echo-like, but fundamentally unmusical, nature of his friend's mind. If only in the final edition of Hearn's works, these letters with selections of some pages from a few others, could be made into a handy, small, and cheap volume for the delighting of the appreciators of literature and of literary character! Comparison of the spiritual and almost _spirituelle_ flas.h.i.+ngs of these, with the ponderous and ba.n.a.l sogginess of hundreds upon hundreds of other pages of his letters, arouses the profound regret that Hearn to the world was "impossible,"

that, as he says, he "could not mingle with men," that no other voices ever so intimately reached the heart of him, or of his dreaming. Even here the amazing coloration furnished by "The Dreamer," as he calls himself, makes us at times feel that the magic of the word-artist and colour-mixer was almost superior to the enduring and awakening reality of Mr. Krehbiel. To this friend, as he writes, he spoke of his thoughts and fancies, wishes and disappointments, frailties, follies, and failures, and successes--even as to a brother. And that was not all he saw and heard in "his enchanted City of Dreams."

The slavery to ign.o.ble journalism, what he calls a "really nefarious profession," was to be resolutely renounced from the day of his arrival in New Orleans. It is "a horrid life," he "could not stand the gaslight;" he "d.a.m.ned reportorial work and correspondence, and the American disposition to work people to death, and the American delight in getting worked to death;" he rebelled against becoming a part of the revolving machinery of a newspaper, because "journalism dwarfs, stifles, emasculates thought and style," and he was bound to "produce something better in point of literary execution."

There was also a not frankly confessed resolve to become respectable in other ways, and to be done with a kind of entanglement of which he was painfully conscious in the Cincinnati life. "I think I can redeem myself socially here! I have got into good society;" "it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio," he writes, and he is proud of living in a Latin city. He recognizes what Mr.

Krehbiel calls his "peculiar and unfortunate disposition," and which he later sets forth as "a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, variable, nervous disposition." Hearn visits a few friends awhile and then disappears for six months, so that he wishes to be hidden in New York except to Krehbiel and Tunison; he will pay a visit to the others he must see just before leaving town--for he is a "demophobe." He tried a secret partners.h.i.+p in keeping a restaurant, and thought to carry on a little French bookstore. He resolved at different times to go to Europe, to Cuba, to Texas, to Cincinnati, and planned all sorts of occupations.

The indications soon multiply that in more ways than in worldly matters he is at variance with his world. He "regards thought as a mechanical process;" he has "no faith in any faith;" "individual life is a particle of that eternal force of which we know so little;" "Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul;" Jesus is a legend and myth; he is "not a believer in free will, nor in the individual soul," etc. Think of a man writing to a Christian minister, think of a Christian minister receiving without protest a personal letter with this in it: "Nor can I feel more reverence for the crucified deity than for that image of the Hindoo G.o.d of light holding in one of his many hands Phallus, and yet wearing a necklace of skulls, etc."

And Hearn, as to ethics, has the courage to write his friend of his convictions: "Pa.s.sion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the mother of language; its gratification the act of a creator, and the divinest rite of Nature's temple." In other letters, unpublished, that exist, Hearn is morbidly frank as to s.e.xual licence and practices. In tropical cities there is "no time for friends.h.i.+p--only pa.s.sion for women, and brief acquaintance for men." Without the influence of s.e.xualism there can be no real greatness; "the mind remains arid and desolate," and he quotes approvingly:--"Virginity, Mysticism, Melancholy--three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by the Christ," etc. "I do not find it possible to persuade myself that the 'mad excess of love' should not be indulged in by mankind," introduces a brilliant page upon the theme, ending with, "after all what else do we live for--ephemerae that we are?" To my protest he wrote, "'Moral'

feelings are those into which the s.e.xual instinct does not visibly enter;" and again, "The s.e.xual sense never tells a _physical_ lie. It only tells an ethical one." There is, to be sure, no answer to a man who says such things.

It is astonis.h.i.+ng, how conscious and at the same time how careless Hearn was of his characteristics and trends. In 1878 he could coldly prepare to attempt a get-rich-quick scheme, "a fraud, which will pay like h.e.l.l, an advertising fraud," etc., because "there is no money in honest work."

At this time also he knew that his own wandering pa.s.sion was "the strongest of all," and that his deepest desire was "to wander forever here and there until he should get old and apish and grey and die." His misfortunes he confessed were of his own making because it was absolutely out of the question for him to "keep any single situation for any great length of time," hating the mere idea of it, "impossible to stay anywhere without getting into trouble." "No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circ.u.mstance than I," he correctly avows. He recognizes that "the unexpected obstacle to success was usually erected by himself."

He acknowledges his ignorance and escapes from it and from the labour, expense, and duty of scholars.h.i.+p by flying, as many others have done, to the world of Imagination, which alone is left to him. "It allows of a vagueness of expression which hides the absence of real knowledge, and dispenses with the necessity of technical precision and detail." He "never reads a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination."

Knowing that he has not true and real genius, he "pledges himself to the wors.h.i.+p of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.

It quite suits my temperament," and he "hopes to succeed in attracting some little attention." The monstrous, the enormous, and the lurid, is sought in the letters. The sentence at the bottom of page 226, Volume One of the "Life and Letters," and the ghastly story, pages 322-323, show the gruesome still much alive, and page 306 that blood, fury, and frenzy haunt his nightmare dreams. "In history one should only seek the extraordinary, the monstrous, the terrible; in mythology the most fantastic and sensuous, just as in romance," And yet he defends himself as a lover of Greek art, detests "the fantastic beauty that is Gothic,"

yet prides himself on being Arabesque. Even the love of Beaudelaire creeps in, and the brutal, horrible photograph of Gautier is "grander than he imagined." Of course to such a mind Matthew Arnold is a "colossal humbug"--and worse.