Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman. George M. Gould
Читать онлайн книгу.
to the task of producing things comic or even satiric, especially such humour and jokes as the Cincinnati newspaper reader wanted in 1874. Of the twelve columns of reading in the first number of Giglampz, Hearn contributed about eight, made up of fifteen or twenty distinct paragraphs. In the second number his contributions number seven; in the third, six; in the fourth, three; in the fifth, four; in the sixth, two; in the seventh, one; in the eighth, one. In about a dozen of the first number, he somewhat unsuccessfully tried to be humorous or satiric, while six were frankly tragical, critical, bitter, etc. In the succeeding numbers Hearn made little effort to be humorous; in the fifth number he describes with startling power a picture of "a hideous scene in the interior of a seraglio;" in number six he returns to the Orient and in "The Fantasy of a Fan" mixes poetry, prose and fancy with a hinting of the subtle soft witchery of the Hearn of twenty-five years later.[8] In the second number is a full-page cut, in which Beecher is depicted as standing before a crowd of jeerers prior to being placed in the stocks, with the scarlet letter "A" upon his breast. Hearn especially requested Mr. Farney to make him one of the conspicuous spectators. The bespectacled face is easily recognizable in the copy given me by the artist. In the seventh number Hearn describes in two columns the story he supposes behind the pictured Gabriel Max, called "The Last Farewell" (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York). It shows so early suggestions of the manhood strength of the wordmaster that I copy it:
[8] Mr. Farney tells me that he had to compel Hearn, even then, to moderate the boldness of sentences which would by their sensualism and licence shock their Cincinnati readers.
THE TALE A PICTURE TELLS
"Butchered to make a Roman Holiday"
The remarkably fine engraving from Gabriel Max's picture, "The Last Farewell," in a late issue of the Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung (and which the New York Graphic a few days since stole to spoil in the stealing), is worthy of the celebrated original at Munich—a painting which will never be forgotten by those who have once beheld it. Among modern painters, probably Max has no superior in the art of harmoniously blending the horrible with the pathetic; and in none of his works is this peculiar power exhibited to better advantage than in "The Last Farewell:" a marvel of colour and composition, one of those rare pictures which seem to reflect the living shadows of a dead age with the weird truthfulness of a wizard's mirror.
A beautiful Roman girl is exposed in the Flavian amphitheatre, to be devoured by wild beasts. She can scarcely be eighteen years old, judging from the slender delicacy of her limbs and the childish sweetness of the pretty little brown face which she has vainly been striving to screen from the rude gaze of the shameless populace with the remnants of a rich black veil—probably torn by the rough hands of some brutal lanista. She leans with her back to the great wall of stone, calmly awaiting her fate without any signs of fear, although the hot, foul breath of a panther is already warm upon her naked feet. To her right, but a few feet away, a leopard and a huge bear are tearing each other to pieces; on her left, another den has just been thrown open, and at its entrance appears the hideous head of an immense tiger, with eyes that flame like emeralds.
You can almost feel the warmth of the fierce summer sun shining on that scene of blood and crime, falling on the yellow sands of the arena, drying the dark pools of human blood the wild beasts have left unlapped. You can almost hear the deep hum of a hundred thousand voices above, and the hideous growlings of the contending brutes below. You wonder whether there is one heart in all that vast crowd of cruel spectators wherein some faint impulse of humanity still lingers, one tongue charitable enough to exclaim:
"Poor little thing!"
No: only wicked whispers followed by coarse laughter; monstrous indifference in the lower tiers, brutal yells of bloodthirsty impatience from the upper seats.
Two Roman knights relieve the monotony of the scene by strange speculation.
"One hundred sesterces that the tiger gets her first!"
"Two hundred on the panther!"
"Done, by the gods! Where are the lions?"
"Why, that cursed barbarian killed the last three this morning, one after another. The finest lions of the lot, too."
"Who are you talking about?—that tall, dark Thracian?"
"No: he was killed the day before by the same gladiator that killed the lions. I mean that golden-haired giant—that Goth. Says he was chief in his own country, or something. He's killed everybody and everything pitted against him so far. And this morning they put him naked in the arena, with nothing but a mirmillo's shield, and a sword; and let the lions loose on him one after another. I bet a thousand sesterces on that little Numidian lion; but the rascal killed him as he sprang, with one sword-thrust, and I lost my thousand sesterces. By Hercules, that Goth is a match for a dozen lions!"
"Brave fellow, by all the gods! Did they give him the wooden sword?"
"Julius Cortonus says they did. I didn't stay to see the rest of the games, for I was too angry about my thousand sesterces."
"Furies take that tiger!—I believe the brute's afraid of the girl!"
"Why, it is madness to throw such a fine-limbed girl as that to the lions!" cries a Greek merchant, lately arrived in Rome. "Eyes and hair, by Zeus, like Venus Anadyomene. I could sell her for a fortune in a slave-market."
"Aedepol! not in a Roman slave-market, you fool. Why, I've known Lucullus to throw better-looking girls than that into his fishpond, to fatten his lampreys with. May Cerberus swallow that cursed tiger!"
The tiger has not yet moved; his vast head and flaming green eyes are just visible at the door of the den. The leopard and the bear are still tearing one another. The panther is gradually, stealthily, noiselessly approaching the poor, helpless girl.
Suddenly a fresh, bright-red rose is thrown from the seats above: it is the last earthly greeting, the last farewell token of some old friend—perhaps a brother, perhaps (O God!) a lover! It falls on the blood-stained sand, shattering itself in perfumed ruin at the maiden's feet.
She starts as the red leaves scatter before her. She advances from the wall, and boldly withdrawing the fragments of her poor, torn veil, looks up into the mighty sea of pitiless visages—looks up with her sweet, childish, cherry-lipped face, and those great, dark, softly sad Roman eyes—to thank him by a last look of love. "Who can it be?"
No one the maiden knows. She only sees a seemingly endless row of cruel and sensual faces, the faces of the wild beast populace of Rome—the faces which smile at the sight of a living human body, torn limb from limb by lions, and scattered over the sands in crimson shreds of flesh. …
Suddenly a terrible yet friendly eye meets and rivets the gaze of her own—an eye keen and coldly-blue as a blade of steel. A sternly handsome Northern face it is, with flowing yellow hair. For an instant the iron lips seem to soften in a smile of pity, and the keen blue eyes become brighter. So do the soft dark ones they meet in that piteous farewell.
She has found her unknown friend.
… A crash—a fierce growl—a faint, helpless cry—a spray of warm, bright blood.
"Ah, Caius! you've lost your hundred sesterces. The Fates are against you to-day!"
"Curse the Fates! Did you see the fool who threw her the rose?"
"That great tall Titan of a fellow, with the yellow hair?"
"Yes. That's the Goth."
"What! the gladiator who killed the lions?"
"The same who won his freedom this morning. See! the fool's wiping his eyes now. These Goths can fight like Hercules, but they whine like sick women when a girl is hurt. They think up in the North that women are to be worshipped like the immortal gods. I wish they'd make the great red-headed brute go down and kill that cursed tiger!"
Hearn's single contribution to