Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman. George M. Gould
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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