Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman. George M. Gould
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try to raise me up. …
The weakness and even exhaustion which the West Indian climate had wrought in Hearn were painfully apparent. His stay in Philadelphia, warm as that summer was to us, brought him speedily back to physical health. The lesson was not unheeded, nor its implications, by his sensitive mind.
I reproduce two photographs of Hearn: the first taken in 1888 (facing page 61); and the second, by Mr. Gutekunst, at my urgent solicitation, in 1889, while Hearn was stopping at my house (Frontispiece).
The first photograph, taken in Martinique, brings out the habitual sadness and lack of vivacity in his physiognomy. In my picture of 1889 (the second) I was unable, despite all effort, to get Hearn to present to the camera his entire face with naturally open eyes, and the customary expression. He resolutely refused, and consented to the compromise of a two-thirds view with closed eyes. And this to me is still the most truthful and hence the most expressive of all his photographs. It is so suggestive because of its negations, so expressive because non-expressive. But it indicates, silently and by inference, the most significant fact about the man.
To those who are expert in such things, the stare of the highly myopic eye is known to be not that of mental action and seeing, but of not seeing. When we walk, we are forward-looking beings, and what goes on within the eye or brain and what may be behind us is totally ignored. But for a highly myopic person there is no outward or forward looking. Hearn's closed eye gives, therefore, a decidedly more truthful lesson in physiognomy than does the open and protruding one, which cannot see the coming or future scene, or which sees it so vaguely that its hint of the scene is perhaps more useless than the imagined picture of the totally blind. His inability to see the presenting world had resulted in a renunciation of outlook and an absolute incuriosity as to the future. With weaklings this might have brought about introspection, the mental eye—the product of the physical eye—turned in upon itself. Hearn was too much of an artist to fall into that Death Valley of all æsthetics, and there was a quick acceptance of the logical and inevitable, whence arose the wonder of poetic retrospection.
CHAPTER III.—THE PERIOD OF THE GRUESOME
WHEN Hearn arrived in Cincinnati, in 1871 or 1872, he was twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. All other methods of making a livelihood except that by his pen had failed, or were soon to fail, and it is not long before the literary way is exclusively and permanently adopted. There was a brief first time of service with Robert Clarke and Company as proof-reader. The exact uses of punctuation, the clearness which the proper marks give to writing, soon earned for him the sobriquet "Old Semicolon" among his fellow reporters. All his life Hearn clung meticulously to his theories concerning the necessity and precise rules of punctuation. Some of his later quarrels with periodical editors and proof-readers arose from differences of opinion in these things. There was a short engagement of Hearn by the librarian, Mr. Thomas Vickers, as private secretary or helper. Among his early friends was a printer, Mr. Henry Watkin, now residing at 1312 McMillan Street, who was kind to him, and who taught him to set type.
"In 1874," Mr. O. P. Caylor[3] writes, "Col. Cockerill of the World was managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer. A few weeks previous to the 'Tan-Yard Murder' Mr. Hearn came to the Enquirer office to sell a manuscript. Upstairs he ventured, but there his courage failed him. It was not enough to induce him to brave the awful editorial presence. So he paced up and down the hall with his velvet restless tread until the awful door opened and the terrible giant came forth. Hearn would, no doubt, have run away had he not been at the rear of the hall when Mr. Cockerill came out into the other end, and the stairway was between.
[3] A quotation in the Author, January 15, 1890, from an article by Mr. Caylor in the Philadelphia North American.
"Thus it occurred that the author of 'Chita' submitted his first manuscript. He came with others later, but never could he persuade himself to knock at that editorial door for admission. Up and down, up and down the hall he would pace or glide until Colonel Cockerill came forth, whether the time consumed in waiting was ten minutes or two hours."
In Current Literature, June, 1896, Colonel John A. Cockerill, writing of Hearn, tells the story thus:
"Some twenty years ago I was the editor in charge of a daily newspaper in a Western city. One day there came to my office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms.
"In a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditure, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable.
"Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written. …
"He sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have him work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his great bulbous eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament.
"His eyes troubled him greatly in those days. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful. … He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances."
In January or February, 1874, there was a horrible murder, "the famous Tan-Yard case," in Cincinnati, and Hearn's account of it in the Enquirer, from the newspaper and reportorial standpoint was so graphic and so far beyond the power of all rivals that he was henceforth assured of employment and of a measure and kind of respect. His friend, Mr. Edward Henderson, formerly city editor of the Commercial, now City Clerk in Cincinnati, says that because of his startling report of this murder "his city editors kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper—the night-stations, for in that field mostly developed the sensational events that were worthy of his pen. In these days his powers would be held in reserve to write up what others should discover. … His repertory was strongest in the unusual and the startling. He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment or following up his self-obtained pointer."
The beginning of Hearn's literary career was his report of the Tan-Yard Murder case. It was published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, November, 1874. I shall quote some parts of it in a footnote to illustrate his innate and studied ability to outfit with words and expressions of the most startling and realistic picturing quality, the most horrible and loathsome facts. Keeping in mind the comparison with the illustrations from his later work in which he was equally capable of painting noble and beautiful things (all except those of a spiritual or religious nature), one is filled with admiration of a faculty so rare and perfect. Those who are sensitive should not read the excerpts which I append, and which are given in obedience to a sense of duty.[4]