Читать книгу Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman - George M. Gould - Страница 8

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I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it to a morbid degree. Any place rather than Cincinnati would have been better for the happiness and success of the emigrating boy, but his relatives had ridded themselves of the burden by assenting to his wish. Excepting that to Japan, the only sensible move he made was from Cincinnati toward the tropics, to the half-way house thither—New Orleans. The desire to seek the au delà was present, his friends tell me, throughout the stay in Cincinnati. Perhaps the single city in the world which would satisfy his dream more nearly than could any other, was New Orleans. Being psychologically for the most part of degenerate Latin stock, and especially of the French variety, with the requisite admixture of exotic and tropical barbarism; bathed, but not cooked, in the hot and brilliant sunshine he loved and hated; touched and energized by too little Teutonic blood and influence, New Orleans offered to the unhappy man the best possible surroundings for the growth of his talents. Adding to this fortunate concensus of circumstance and partly a corollary of it was the most fortunate of all accidents that could have occurred to him—that is, the existence of a daily newspaper such as the Times-Democrat; of a paying mass of subscribers relishing Hearn's translations from the most artistic French writers of the short-story; and, most important of all, the presence on the bridge of the noble Captain of the Newspaper enterprise, the veteran editor, Mr. Page M. Baker. One shudders to think what would have been Hearn's later career had it not been for the guidance and help of this wise, sympathetic and magnanimous friend. For the one thing needed by Hearn in those who would be his friends rather than their own was magnanimity. It was his frequent misfortune in life to come under the influence of those as incapable of true unselfishness and real kindness as it was natural for them to be cunning and to use an assumed friendship for hidden flatteries and purposes of their own. Most of these would not have dreamed of associating with the man for any reason other than to stand in the reflected light of his literary fame. Most of them had as little care for his poetic prose, and as little appreciation or knowledge of good literature as they had of "the enclitic de." They had no magnanimity, only wile instead of it. As Hearn was also deprived of large-mindedness in all affairs of the world, he was unhappily prone to accept the offered bribe. He wanted above all things to be flattered and to do as his imperious impulses and weak will suggested. Any one who recognized these things in him and seconded the follies, remained his permitted "friend," but those who withstood them in the least and ran counter to his morbid trends and resolves—these were speedily "dropped," and insulted or grieved to silence. If they had magnanimity, they bore with the man in pity and answered his insults with kind words and kinder deeds. They recognized that they were responsible not to the man but to the carrier of a great talent, and although they might not forget, they gladly forgave, if possibly they might speed him on his predestined way.

Of this number was Baker. Directly or indirectly through him, came a long and happy period of life; came the congenial, educating work, without slavery, of the translations and other easy reportorial services. Of equal importance were the financial rewards. Before and after the New Orleans time not the least of Hearn's misfortunes was his intolerable and brutalizing improvidence and impecuniousness. Under Baker's friendship he came to what for such a person was affluence and independence. He found leisure to read and study and think outside of the journalistic pale, and better still, perhaps—better to his thinking, at least—he secured the means to indulge his life-long desire for curious and out-of-the-way books. During this time it grew to consciousness with him that in everything, except as regards his beloved Art, he had a little learned to recognize the worth of money.

But within him grew ever stronger the plague of the unsatisfied, the sting of unrest, and he was compelled to obey. In a letter to me from Martinique, after he had recognized his mistake, he admits and explains as follows:

I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of the intellectual life are all lacking here—no libraries, no books in any language;—a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for months.

But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more daily—that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish things—that life is very sweet without them;—and you actually find yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for life in the North are all madness—that they wasted years which might have been delightfully dozed away in a land where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot.

I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a while—a short while, probably;—but I do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become tired of places—or at least of the disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place—the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;—and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;—yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. Such is exactly my present feeling—an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America—in the nervous centres of the world's activity. One feels it least, I imagine, in the tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to do:—To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;—to keep it requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it in very short order.

I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went to Demerara and visited the lesser West Indies in July and August of last year—returned to New York after three months with some MS.—sold it—felt very unhappy at the idea of staying in New York, where I had good offers—suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics by the same steamer that had brought me. I had no commission, resolved to trust to magazine-work. So far I have just been able to scrape along;—the climate numbs mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for won't come. The real—surpassing imagination—whelms the ideal out of sight and hearing. The world is young here—not old and wise and grey as in the North; and one must not seek the Holy Ghost in it. I suspect that the material furnished by the tropics can only be utilized in a Northern atmosphere. We will talk about it together.

That he never thought to return to New Orleans is demonstrated by the fact that when he left, he shipped his books to another good friend and great editor, Mr. Alden, to keep for him. When he came to the United States in 1889, he fully intended returning to some tropical land. But it was otherwise ordered, and most fortunately, for a year or two more of life under such conditions would have killed both mind and body.

Upon Hearn's arrival in New Orleans, he began sending a series of charming letters to the Cincinnati Commercial, signed "Ozias Midwinter."[11] They are, indeed, exquisite, and as certainly of a delicacy and beauty which must have made the reader of that time and newspaper wonder what strange sort of a correspondent the editor had secured. The first letter was about Memphis, passed on his way South. I cite some parts to show how the gruesome was merging into or being supplanted by something larger and better, and also to illustrate Hearn's growing interest in colours.

[11] Kindly secured by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, Ohio, from a friend and lent to me.

The stranger, however, is apt to leave Memphis with one charming recollection of the place—the remembrance of the sunset scene from the bluffs across the river over Arkansas. I do not think that any part of the world can offer a more unspeakably beautiful spectacle to the traveller than what he may witness any fair evening from those rugged old bluffs at Memphis. The first time I saw it the day had been perfectly bright and clear—the blue of the sky was unclouded by the least fleecy stain of white cloud; and the sun descended in the west—not in a yellow haze, or a crimson fog, but with the splendour of his fiery glory almost undimmed. He seemed to leave no trace of his bright fires behind him; and the sky-blue began to darken into night-purple from the east almost immediately. I thought at first it was one of the least romantic sunsets I had ever seen. It was not until the stars were out, and the night had actually fallen, that I beheld the imperial magnificence of that sunset.

I once thought, when sailing up the Ohio one bright Northern summer, that the world held nothing more beautiful than the scenery of the Beautiful River—those voluptuous hills with their sweet feminine curves, the elfin gold of that summer haze, and the pale emerald of the river's verdure-reflecting breast. But even the loveliness of the Ohio seemed faded, and the Northern sky-blue palely cold, like the tint of iceberg pinnacles, when I beheld for the first time the splendour of the Mississippi.

"You must come on deck early to-morrow," said the kind Captain of the Thompson Dean; "we are entering the Sugar Country."

So I saw the sun rise over the cane-fields of Louisiana.

It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its setting at Memphis, but of another colour;—an auroral flush of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests of cocoanut palms. Then the day broke gently and slowly—a day too vast for a rapid dawn—a day that seemed deep as Space. I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a vaulted church-roof beside that sky—a sky so softly beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite.

And the giant river broadened to a mile—smooth as a mirror, still and profound as a mountain lake. Between the vastness of the sky and the vastness of the stream, we seemed moving suspended in the midst of day, with only a long, narrow tongue of land on either side breaking the brightness. Yet the horizon never became wholly blue. The green-golden glow lived there all through the day; it was brightest in the south. It was so tropical, that glow;—it seemed of the Pacific, a glow that forms a background to the sight of lagoons and coral reefs and "lands where it is always afternoon."

Below this glow gleamed another golden green, the glory of the waving cane-fields beyond the trees. Huge sugar-mills were breathing white and black clouds into the sky, as they masticated their mighty meal; and the smell of saccharine sweetness floated to us from either shore. Then we glided by miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls; and by the mouths of broad bayous;—past swamps dark with cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient trees;—past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot through with gold. The magnificent old mansions of the Southern planters, built after a generous fashion unknown in the North, with broad verandas and deliciously cool porches, and all painted white or perhaps a pale yellow, looked out grandly across the water from the hearts of shadowy groves; and, like villages of a hundred cottages, the negro quarters dotted the verdant face of the plantation with far-gleaming points of snowy whiteness.

And still that wondrous glow brightened in the south, like a far-off reflection of sunlight on the Spanish Main.

"But it does not look now as it used to in the old slave days," said the pilot, as he turned the great wheel. "The swamps were drained, and the plantations were not overgrown with cottonwood; and somehow or other the banks usen't to cave in then as they do now."

I saw indeed signs of sad ruin on the face of the great plantations; there were splendid houses crumbling to decay, and whole towns of tenantless cabins; estates of immense extent were lying almost unfilled, or with only a few acres under cultivation; and the vigorous cottonwood trees had shot up in whole forests over fields once made fertile by the labour of ten thousand slaves. The scene was not without its melancholy; it seemed tinged by the reflection of a glory passed away—the glory of wealth, and the magnificence of wealth; of riches and the luxury of riches.

O fair paradise of the South, if still so lovely in thy ruin, what must thou have been in the great day of thy greatest glory!

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 shore. 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 republishing had I space 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 shipping, the sugar-landing, the cotton-shipping, 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, "Père Antoine's Date-Palm," written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published in the same volume with "Marjorie Daw" and other tales?

Père Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and died in New Orleans. As a boy, he conceived a strong friendship 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. Père Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friendship strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also passed 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 passed into that great sleep which is dreamless. And she was buried by Père 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 passed by, and the roaring city grew up about the priest's home and the palm-tree, trying to push Père 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 passed 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 Père Antoine's date-palm. Alas! nobody had ever heard of the Père 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 Père 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 shores. 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 Père 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 Père 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 Père 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 Japanese 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 wingèd word. I think it was innate and spontaneous with him, a gift of the inscrutable, illogic, and fantastically generous-niggard 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 gods 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 "scrapbooks." But the dates of publication and other details are often characteristically wanting. Elsewhere in the present volume the titles, 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 publishing 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 principal 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-class popular novel. Finally, artistic translations do not obtain a ready market with first-class 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-class 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 François 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 class 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 circumstances, 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 space 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 Japan. He repeatedly had urged that letter-writing both financially and mentally was expensive to the writer. In Japan 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 Japanese 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 gratitude 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 classified 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
Nishida	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 Japan, or in some instances reflecting friendships 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 cocoon—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 rôle so much as to make these pages so astonishingly 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 flashings of these, with the ponderous and banal 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 ignoble 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 "damned 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 partnership 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.