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THERE are as many possible biographies of a man as there are possible biographers—and one more! Of Lafcadio Hearn there has been, and there will be, no excuse for any biography whatever. A properly edited volume of his letters, and, perhaps, a critical estimate of the methods and development of his imaginative power and literary character are, and still remain, most desirable. That some competent hand may yet be found to undertake this task is still hoped by those who recognize the value of a man's best work. To furnish material and help toward this end is my object in collecting the following pages. The life of a literary man interests and is of value to the world because of the literature he has created. Without a bibliography, without even mention of the works he wrote, his biography would be useless. To correct many untrue and misleading statements and inferences of a serious nature that have been published concerning him and his life, should it ever be undertaken, will prove a labour so difficult and thankless that it will scarcely be entered upon by one who would do it rightly. That it will not be hazarded comes, as I have said, from the fact that it is not needed, because neither Hearn himself, nor his real friends, nor again, a discriminating literary sense, have been, nor can be, under any illusion as to his "greatness." He has been spoken of as "a great man," which, of course, he was not. Two talents he had, but these were far from constituting personal greatness. Deprived by nature, by the necessities of his life, or by conscious intention, of religion, morality, scholarship, magnanimity, loyalty, character, benevolence, and other constituents of personal greatness, it is more than folly to endeavour to place him thus wrongly before the world.

The irony of the situation is pathetically heightened by the fact that, supposing him to be very great, "the weaknesses of very great men," which he said should not be spoken of, are amazingly paraded in the letters. Had he ever dreamed that his letters would be published, he would not, and could not, have so unblushingly exposed himself and his faults to the public gaze. The fact has now been writ exceeding large, or it would not be, and should not be, corrected and contradicted. A word to the wise suffices.

There remains the question, truly pertinent, concerning the nature and progress toward perfection of his imagination, and of his literary execution.

We know nothing, and doubtless we may never know anything definite, accurate and of value about the character either of his father or of his mother. Any attempt, therefore, to estimate what effect heredity had in handing down the strange endowment we find in his early manhood is wholly futile. We may not be too sure concerning either the parentage or nationality ascribed to him.

Moreover, in the last analysis, Hearn was no "product of his environment." In a certain sense, he was of the school of Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Loti, and Zola, but with such differences and variations that these teachers may not take much credit or flattery to themselves. The great, the distinctive, the dominating force which controlled and created Hearn's literary makings, his morbid vision, was not "environment" as the critics and scientists mean by the term. These have not yet learned that Art and Life hang upon the perfection and peculiarities of the senses of the artist and of the one who lives, and that intellect and especially æsthetics are almost wholly the product of vision. Conversely, the morbidities and individualisms of Art and Life often depend pre-eminently upon the morbidities of vision.

Character, lastly, is the action or reaction of personality against circumstance, not under and dominated by circumstance. To have character is to control circumstance; Hearn was always its slave. Except in one particular, the pursuit of literary excellence, Hearn had no character whatever. His was the most unresisting, most echolike mind I have ever known. He was a perfect chameleon; he took for the time the colour of his surroundings. He was always the mirror of the friend of the instant, or if no friend was there, of the dream of that instant. The next minute he was another being, acted upon by the new circumstance, reflecting the new friend, or redreaming the old and new-found dream. They who blame him too sharply for his disloyalty and ingratitude to old friends do not understand him psychologically. There was nothing behind the physical and neurologic machine to be loyal or disloyal. He had no mind, or character, to be possessed of loyalty or disloyalty. For the most part, he simply dropped his friends, and rarely spoke ill of them or of his enemies. There was nothing whatever in him, except perhaps for the short time when he said his friend had given him a soul, to take the cast and function of loyalty or disloyalty, gratitude or ingratitude. One does not ask originality or even great consistency of an echo, and, of all men that have ever lived, Hearn, mentally and spiritually, was most perfectly an echo. The sole quality, the only originality, he brought to the fact, or to the echo, was colour—a peculiar derivation of a maimed sense. He created or invented nothing; his stories were always told him by others; at first they were gruesome tales even to horror and disgust. He learned by practice to choose lovelier stories, ones always distant, sometimes infinitely distant, and he learned to retell or echo them with more artistic skill and even a matchless grace. His merit, almost his sole merit, and his unique skill lay in the strange faculty of colouring the echo with the hues and tints of heavenly rainbows and unearthly sunsets, all gleaming with a ghostly light that never was on sea or shore. So that, fused as he was with his work, he himself became that impossible thing, a chromatic voice, a multicoloured echo.

We must, therefore, accept the facts as we find them, the young man as we find him, uneducated, friendless, without formed character, with a lot of heathenish and unrestrained appetites, crippled as to the most important of the senses, poverty-stricken, improvident, of peculiar and unprepossessing appearance and manners, flung into an alien world in many ways more morbid than himself. That he lived at all is almost astonishing, and that he writhed out, how he did it, and the means whereby he finally presented to the best artistic and literary intellects of the world prized values and enjoyments, is indeed worthy of some attention and study.

From letters written to me just prior to his death by that veteran and discriminating critic, Mr. Edmund C. Stedman, I quote a few sentences to show that the appreciation of Hearn has by no means reached its full measure:

"I passed an evening with your Hearn manuscript and the supplementary matter by my granddaughter, and found them both well done and of deep interest. Some of your passages are beautifully written and make me think that if you will give us more of the style which is so plainly at your command, you will gain, etc. … The publishers do not understand, as I do, that Hearn will in time be as much of a romantic personality and tradition as Poe now is. I strongly urged one publisher to buy those copyrights owned by three other firms on any terms and in the end bring out a definitive edition of his complete works."

As to Miss Stedman's workmanlike bibliography, it should be said that the rule which has been followed in excluding less valuable reviews and notices, was based upon the effort to include doubtful ones only when of exceptional value, by a personal friend of Hearn, etc. Files of ordinary newspapers are not preserved even in local libraries, and, therefore, references to them have been excluded except under peculiar circumstances of authorship, opinions stated, etc.

For their kind permission to make extracts from Hearn's published works, grateful acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Little, Brown and Company, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper Brothers, and The Macmillan Company.

Should this volume bring in more money than the necessary expenses of compiling it, the excess will be sent to Mrs. Hearn through the Japanese Consul, or in some other way.

George M. Gould.