Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 5

With increasing frequency are repeated the complaints of disillusionment; he is frightened at the loss even of the love of the beautiful, and his friend tries in vain to rouse him from his ghost-life and dreaming. There are absurd excuses why he cannot work; when among beautiful things he cannot write of them, when he is away he is longing for them; there are months when he cannot do anything, and a little thing is produced with great pain and labour. "The old enthusiasm has completely died out of me." The people and the city are adequately cursed, and upon the debilitating climate is laid a proper and ever-repeated anathema. He loathes the North, especially New York City, "shudders at the bare idea of cold;" he yearns and pines for a still more tropical country which he knows may kill him, and which came near doing so. The _Wanderl.u.s.t_ is upon him as pa.s.sages on pages 183, 193, 196, 197, 207, 215, 223, 224, 398 of Volume One of the "Life and Letters" ill.u.s.trate. At last he is off for Martinique, where work and even thought are still more impossible because of the benumbing heat.

Here follows a list of the unsigned editorials contributed by Hearn to his paper. It is made up from two of the sc.r.a.p-books left me, and is ent.i.tled:

SUNDAY AND SPECIAL EDITORIALS BY LAFCADIO HEARN FOR THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT, 1885-1887.

1. The "Peronospora Ferrani" and Cholera Vaccination.

2. Literary Pessimism.

3. "The Song Celestial."

4. The Canonization of the Mahdi.

5. "Successor of Tamerlane."

6. The World's Journalism.

7. A Scientific Novelty.

8. The Jewish Question in Europe (Suppressed by the management).

9. Russian Literature Abroad.

10. The European Trouble.

11. Missionaries as Linguists.

12. Courbet.

13. Poetry and Pay.

14. The Present and Future of India.

15. An Archaeological Novel.

16. An Evolutional History.

17. A New Pompeii.

18. Archaeology in Cambodia.

19. The Great "I-Am."

20. A Terrible Novel.

21. The Latin Church in the East and Bismarck.

22. English Policy in China.

23. The Fear of Death.

24. A Danger to Egypt--The Senousiya.

25. Archaeological News from China.

26. Icelandic Prospects.

27. A Great English Physician.

28. Academical Triumphs.

29. The Magician of Paris.

30. Tolstoi's Vanity of Wisdom.

31. "Minos."

32. Newspapers and Religion.

33. Minos.

34. A Concord Compromise.

35. De Mercier on Dante.

36. The Origin of Christmas.

37. "Immortality" according to Dr. Holland.

38. The Future of Idealism.

39. "Solitude."

40. Dr. Holland's Defenders.

41. The Religion of Suffering.

42. The Ruins of Carthage.

43. A Defence of Pessimism.

44. Over-Education in Germany.

45. Decadence as a Fine Art.

46. Use of the Eye or the Ear in Learning Languages.

47. The Shadow of the "Light of Asia."

48. The Jew upon the Stage.

49. Some Theosophical Iconoclasm.

50. "Hamlet's Note-Book."

51. The Invasion of the Desert.

52. Resurrected aestheticism.

53. Translations.

54. Nihilistic Literature in the United States.

55. Some Human Frailty.

56. An Art-Reformer.

57. Some Notes on Creole Literature.

58. The Scientific Value of Creole.

59. "l'OEuvre."

60. A Havanese Romance.

61. Some Supposed Sanscrit Translations.

62. The Omnivorous Newspaper.

63. A Religious Nightmare.

64. Joaquin Miller.

65. Pictures vs. Text.

66. "Follow the Donkey Path."

67. A Sketch of the Creole Patois.

68. In Spain.

69. Chinese Belief in G.o.d.

70. "Towards the Gulf."

71. Tennyson's Locksley Hall.

72. "Doesn't Want Any Progress."

73. The Howard Memorial Library--A Letter from Charles Dudley Warner.

74. A Definitive Rossetti.

75. The Chinese Future.

76. Artistic Value of Myopia.

77. Colours and Emotions.

CHAPTER V.--AT MARTINIQUE

THE lure of the Sea and of the Unknown was upon Hearn during the entire stay at New Orleans. How deeply it entered his heart is shown in a fragment rescued by his friend, Dr. Matas, which has been kindly sent me. The copy is in print, but when and where it was published we have been unable to learn. It was probably written in 1885 or 1886. As it gives glimpses at once into Hearn's mind, of his fateful desire to roam, of his Nature-love, and, better, of his growing mastery of technic and imagery, I reproduce herewith the fragment, which he ent.i.tled:

GULF WINDS

Golden oranges piled up in bins,--apples of the Southern Hesperides;--a medley of meridional tongues,--silky Latin tongues and their silkier patois; Chinese buyers yellow as bananas, quadroons with skin like dead gold; swarthy sailors from the Antilles; sharp odours of fruit freshly disembarked;--all the semi-tropical sights and sounds of the French market. I stood beside an orange-bin; and priced the fruit. Fifty cents a hundred! While wondering how much the fruit-vender's profit could possibly be, I was insensibly attracted by something unusual in his face--a shadow of the beauty of the antique world seemed to rest upon it. "Are you not a Greek?" I asked, for there was no mistaking the metoposcopy of that head. Yes; he was from Zante--first a sailor, now a fruit-vender; some day, perhaps, he would be a merchant.

It is among those who sell, not among those who buy, that the most curious studies of human nature and of the human face are to be made in the French market. These dealers are by no means usually French, but they are mostly from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of Southern Europe. They are wanderers, who have wandered all over the face of the earth to find rest at last in this city of the South; they are sailors who have sailed all seas, and sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, and finally anch.o.r.ed their lives by the levee of New Orleans. The Neapolitan Italian, the Spaniard, the Corsican, the Levantine Greek, seek rest from storm here, in a clime akin to their own and under a sky as divinely blue, and at a port not far distant from their beloved sea. For these Levantine sailors hate dusty inland cities and the dry air of the Great West.

If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea;--if, in early 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 fis.h.i.+ng-vessels turn rosy in the blush of 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 h.o.a.ry breakers, and received the Ocean-G.o.d's christening, the glorious baptism of salt,--then, perhaps, you know only too well why these sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes within the heart of the land. Twenty years may have pa.s.sed 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 water,--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?