Lafcadio Hearn Part 10

Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance.

Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among these. Even in spite of Loti's description of j.a.pan and his treatment of j.a.panese ladies in "Madame Chrysantheme," Hearn retained the same admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaitre or Anatole France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die, one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read 'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."

Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of the poets he declared he did not care for. In j.a.pan, Mr. Mason told us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement, repeated pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage from various poems of Browning in his soft musical voice.

A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so accurate that the a.s.sembled company listened in amazement.

Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in j.a.pan, when he nationalised himself a j.a.panese and habitually wore the j.a.panese kimono.

At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he was a much more responsible and important person than the little "brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John c.o.c.kerill's office, turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes, the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the other. In his sensitive, morbid fas.h.i.+on he greatly over-exaggerated the disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always photographed in profile looking down.

In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made his acquaintance in j.a.pan, gives the following account of his personal manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before the j.a.pan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice; seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much, and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected, companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly, he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in j.a.pan. He appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in j.a.pan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion, tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious.

Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a foreigner so eager to interpret j.a.pan should be himself so occidental in appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting."

Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy, diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the pa.s.sers-by in the streets of Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step, singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould tells us, in inducing him to subst.i.tute conventional headgear for the enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel s.h.i.+rt, that he habitually wore.

Mr. Mason, in j.a.pan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a starched s.h.i.+rt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white s.h.i.+rts as a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't wear white s.h.i.+rts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do.

"Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white s.h.i.+rts!

Yet even the linen s.h.i.+rt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It represents in our fas.h.i.+on the survival of something, once a luxurious cla.s.s distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the b.u.t.tons sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."

In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his j.a.panese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have nothing that was not of the best make and quality.

In later years he was described by an acquaintance in j.a.pan as an odd, nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you came in contact with him.

CHAPTER XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS

"The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses and change them several times a day; and the mult.i.tude of dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to the mult.i.tude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and people doubted their own senses when they saw these things ... and the men who most admired her could not presume to fall in love with her because that would have been absurd.

She had altogether too many souls."

The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he had hitherto known entered his life, an influence destined to last for close on a quarter of a century, from these New Orleans days until the month of September, 1904, when he died.

In all the annals of literary friends.h.i.+ps between men and women, it is difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory than this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange little Irish genius.

Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more tender, none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and friends.h.i.+p, as told in his letters.

The affection between Jean Jacques Ampere and Madame Recamier is the one that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is reversed. Madame Recamier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity, s.h.i.+elded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him in the tussle of life.

Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his side.

"There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik from j.a.pan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore, "whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement."

Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed conviction that her love--as love is understood in common parlance--could never be his.

And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere friends.h.i.+p. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not; she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a neophyte, also wors.h.i.+pped.

Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner, ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of journalistic work in New Orleans.

Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the _Times Democrat_. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed of what were known as "Hearn's admirers."

His translations from Gautier, Maupa.s.sant, "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He also, under the t.i.tle of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them all--love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of green has.h.i.+sch.

One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse--

"My heart would hear her and beat Had I lain for a century dead;-- Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red."

The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the _Times Democrat_.

There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years, wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic"

was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitch.e.l.l McDonald years afterwards in j.a.pan, we find Hearn referring to the expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story in which I first used it--years and years ago. Don't return the thing--it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush."

Mitch.e.l.l McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French Impressionist school.

The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.

A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love, yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And at last it came to pa.s.s that the woman whose name had been murmured by his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she, unconscious, pa.s.sed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away forever.

Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron.

Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence, dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself in the mediocrity to which she belonged.

Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland had become), he refers to those first years of friends.h.i.+p in the strange old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness, and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought, _une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could give the same sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a particular variety of savage, that he could not understand--and was afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since then I have become grey and the father of three boys."

For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's friends.h.i.+p they seem to have occupied towards one another the position of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems, he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres francaises' (as Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy...."

Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her, mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The G.o.ds only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom in the room--but in the future, which was black without stars!"

In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the Tertiary epoch--three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most ancient branch of humanity."

It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was written and contributed to _Harper's Magazine_ under the t.i.tle of "Torn Letters."

We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of s.p.a.ce nor spite of circ.u.mstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as you pa.s.s from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his genius and quickened his pen.

I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for dinner, or put on a starched collar or s.h.i.+rt front.

In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the _Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.

She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?

"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow, but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pa.s.s out of existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case, this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches, the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details, that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being fragmentary and unfinished.

After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly, writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope.

"It is a formality--and you are you; and you are not a formality--but a somewhat--and I am only I."[15]

[15] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.