Volume I Part 5 (1/2)
Sick, unhappy, and unpopular, flight to other scenes naturally suggested itself Mr Tunison thus describes the influences deter the move to New Orleans, which occurred in 1877:--
”As Hearn advanced in his power to write, the sense of the discorew upon hied for Southern air and scenes One , after the usual hard work of an unusually nasty winter night in Cincinnati, in a leisure hour of conversation he heard an associate on the paper describe a scene in the Gulf State It was so about an old mansion of an ante-bellum cotton prince, with its white coluro quarters stretching away in the background; the cypress and live-oaks hung with s of the ht”
Hearn took in every word of this with great keenness of interest, as was shown by the usual dilation of his nostrils when excited, though he had little to say at the tih he could see, and hear, and s for New Orleans he reo, sooner or later, but it was your description of the sunlight, and hts hich the South appeals to the senses that determined me I shall feel better in the South, and I believe I shall do better”
Though nostalgia for Southern wars, the i the paper on which he was enment to deal with a story of hydrophobia, in which he suspected he had been given soh his suspicions were possibly unjust, he announced that he had lost his loyalty to the paper and abruptly quitted it
It is said that he went first to Me Cincinnati, but no proof of this re the scene of it in Tennessee
The question of essential wrong and right being under discussion, his companion advanced the theory that morals varied so much with localities and conditions that it was iht say that it was essentially wrong or essentially right After thinking this over in his broodingthat is alrong, profoundly wrong under any conditions”
”And that?” he was asked
”To cause pain to a helpless creature for one's own pleasure,” was his answer; and then, in illustration, continued: ”Once I alking along a road in Tennessee, and I saw a e--for what cause I don't know A kitten was crossing the road at the ht it up and blinded it and flung it froe I was not near enough to stop him, but I had a pistol in my pocket--I always carried one then--and I fired four tiht is so bad, I missed him” After a few rets of my life that I missed”
Sometime in 1877--the time of the year is uncertain--Hearn arrived in New Orleans, and frorapher becoun the admirable series of letters to H E
Krehbiel, which record the occupations and interests of his life for the next twelve years, setting forth, as no one less gifted than himself could, the impressions he received, the development of his mind, the trend of his studies, the infinite labour by which he slowly built up his ue and the reat stylists of the Nineteenth Century These letters ly he pursued his purpose to becoh poverty and self-sacrifice; make clear how the Dream never failed to lead him, and how broad a foundation of study and discipline he laid during his apprenticeshi+p for the structure he was later to rear for his own ain no comment could do, the modesty of his self-appreciation, and the essentially enthusiastic and affectionate nature of his character
The first work he secured in New Orleans was on the staff of the _Daily Item_, one of the es, wrote editorials, and occasionally contributed a translation, or soinal work in the shape of what ca in the change of residence, for the old, dusty, unpaved squalid New Orleans of the '70's--the city crushed into inanition by war, poverty, pestilence, and the frenzy of carpet-bagger misrule--was fartown he had abandoned
The gaunt, ed in abandoned, cru apartments,--still decorated with the tattered splendours of a prosperous past,--where he was served by tientlewo courts behind the blank, s of wanderers--all the colourful, polyglot, half-tropical life of the toas a constant appeal to the roer--arising out of the conditions of the unhappy city--he took no thought till after the great epide suhter form of the disease But even the cruelties of his new ho chapter of ”Chita”
the anguish of a death by yellow fever is set forth with a quivering reality which only a personal knowledge of some phases of the disease could have made possible
Always pursued by a desire to free hied into experi at one ti his hardly gathered savings to a sharper ned a restaurant, and who ran ahen the enterprise proved a failure On another occasion he put by everything beyond his bare necessities in one of theup all over the country at that time, and with the collapse of this investment he finally and forever abandoned further financial enterprises, regarding theh for some years he continued to dwell now and then on the possibility of starting second-hand bookshops in hopelessly impossible places--such as the then est, with lovably absurd navete, that a _shrewd_ luttony for rare books on recondite matters kept him constantly poor, but proved a far better investment, as tools of trade, than his other and athered a library of several hundred volu series of scrapbooks containing his earlier essays in literary journalis his characteristic _flair_ for the exotic and the strange
In 1881 he, by great good fortune, was brought into contact with the newly consolidated _Times-Democrat_, a journal whose birth eneration of the long depressed community, and whose staff included ustin, who represented the best i both the Ae M Baker, the editor-in-chief, he drew in after years this faithful pen-picture:--
”You say my friend writes nicely He is about the most lovable ht, with a singular face He is so exactly the ideal Mephistopheles that he would never get his photograph taken The face does not altogether belie the character,--but the inal
It never offends The real Mephistopheles appears only when there are ugly obstacles to overcome Then the diabolic keenness hichmoves by which a plot is checkmated, or a net made for the plotter himself, usually startle people He is a man of immense force,--it takes such a one to rule in that corace or consideration I always loved hih of his cohtful coterie of men hom chance had associated hiifts Honore Burthe was the ideal of the ”beau sabreur” of romantic French tradition, personally beautiful, brave to absurdity; a soldier of fortune under entle courtesy, and a scholar John Augustin--with less of the ”panache”--inherited also the beauty, courage, and breeding of those picturesque ancestors, who had entleman-adventurers the most ornamental colonists of North America Charles Whitney, by contrast, had fallen heir to all the shrewd, huled successfully for possession of the great inheritance of America, and which finallythese four rather uncommon types of journalists Lafcadio Hearn found ready sympathy and appreciation, and a chance to develop in the direction of his talents and desires He was treated by theent consideration of his idiosyncrasies new in his experience, and was allowed to expand along the natural line of his tastes and capacities, with the result that he soon began to attract attention, and was finally able to find his outlet in the direction to which his preparatory labours and inherent genius were urging hily fortunate to have found such companions and such an opportunity At that period the new journalism was dominant almost everywhere, and perhaps nowhere in the United States, except in New Orleans,--with its large French population and its residuum of the ante-bellum leisurely cultivation of taste, and love of lordly beauties of style,--could he have found an audience and a daily newspaper which eagerly sought, and rewarded to the best of its ability, a type of belles-lettres which was caviare to the general His first work consisted of a weekly translation from some French writer--Theophile Gautier, Guy de Maupassant, or Pierre Loti, whose books he was one of the first to introduce to English readers, and for whose beautiful literary manner he always retained theyears afterward in japan he spoke of one of the worst afflictions of a recent illness as having been the fear that he should die without having finished Loti's ”L'Inde sans les Anglais,” which he was reading when seized by the malady These translations were usually accompanied--in another part of the paper--by an editorial, elucidatory of either the character and method of the author, or the subject of the paper itself, and these editorials were often vehicles of much curious research on a multitude of odd subjects, such as the fas, ends, monstrous literary exploits, and the like; echoes of which studies appear frequently in the Krehbiel and O'Connor letters in this volume
From tiinal papers, unsigned, which found a small but appreciative audience, some of ere sufficiently interested to enquire the identity of the author, and who grew into a local clientele which always thereafter followed the growth of his fa these ”Fantastics” and translations was published the whole contents of his three early books--”One of Cleopatra's Nights,” ”Stray Leaves froe Literature,” and ”Some Chinese Ghosts”--but these books wereseverity of taste considered worthy of reproduction Much delightful matter which failed quite to reach this standard lapsed into extinction in the files of the journal
A these was one which has been recovered by chance fro to a criticism by a friend of the use of the phrase ”lentor inexpressible” in a ement, he promises to delete it, speaks of it as a ”trick phrase” of his, and encloses the old clipping to shohere he had first used it, and adds ”please burn or tear up after readingthis essay belongs to the Period of Gush”
Fortunately his correspondent--as didin his handwriting, and the fragment which bore-- lacks its caption) reive an example of some of the work that bears the flaws of his 'prentice hand, before he used his tools with the assured skill of a master:--
No rest he knew because of her Even in the night his heart was ever startled from slumber as by the echo of her footfall; and dreaht forgetfulness in strange kisses herbetween So that, weary of his life, he yielded it up at last in the fevered su with her name upon his lips And his face was no more seen in the palm-shadowed streets,