his poverty at this time seem almost legendary-sleeping in dry goods' boxes in the street or in a boiler in a vacant lot."

I dream of ugly things-things that happened long ago. I am alone in an American city, and I have only ten cents in my pocket; and to send off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for the day's food; the horror of being without employ in an American city appals me . because I remember.

He at last obtained newspaper work on the staff of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Some months elapsed when occurred that incident which Dr. Gould, in the peculiar language of which he every now and again makes use, cites as proving Hearn's love of 'gloating over the clotted villainies of medieval horror.'

I, on the contrary, think it as pathetic as any record in the range of literary annals.

A horrible murder had been committed. The news reached the office at a time when all the members of the staff usually employed to report such things were absent. At the end of his tether to know what to do, the editor turned towards one of the 'cub reporters,' ‘a quaint dark-skinned little fellow, who always sat in the corner, his head bent close over the paper, scratching away with the diligence of a beaver.' Eagerly the youth accepted the editor's offer.

Dr. Gould feels impelled by 'his sense of duty' to give us almost the whole of this vivid masterpiece of description. As a delineation in its most appalling physical details of blood-curdling realism it thrills us now, as it thrilled the city of Cincinnati in 1874.

His triumph was complete. A possibility of snatching time for work on his own account, and a decent salary, were henceforth assured.

Who is most to blame in the circumstances? The editor who fed his public on such noxious stuff, the public who devoured it, or the half-blind starving boy who at last saw a gleam of light break through the gloom of hunger and misery that surrounded him?

In spite of the drudgery of his newspaper work at this time, in the small hours of the morning, after his police rounds, and the writing of columns in his inimitable style, he might be seen under a miserable jet of gas, sometimes until broad daylight, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating from Gautier.

One of his long-cherished dreams was the blending of a Latin and Anglo-Saxon style, to create in fiction something that would unite the element of strength, characteristic of Northern thought, with the warmth of colour and the richness of imagery peculiar to Latin literature. Some have expressed regret that these years were devoted to such works as Clarimonde, Aria Marcella, and Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony.

The how or the where an artist learns the language in which his

thoughts are to be expressed is a matter of small importance, compared with what he says when comprehension, significance, and style are his.

It was during these Cincinnati days that he is credited with having attempted to legalise by marriage a connexion that he had formed with a mulatto woman.

Dr. Gould has not inspired us with sufficient confidence in his accuracy to permit us to accept this statement without considerable hesitation. Letters from friends of Hearn in America which I have not the space to quote put a very different complexion upon this business. An eighth portion of black blood, we have to remember, made a marriage illegal at that time in America. This prohibition no longer exists, but it is useless to shirk the fact that primeval passion was part of the groundwork of Lafcadio's work and faith, as it is of most of those to whom art is outside and beyond conventions and social restraints. His opinion of women before he went to Japan was certainly not a high one. Deprived of his mother at an early age, placed under the care of a not very wise old lady, sent to a college to be prepared for the priesthood, and then plunged by the necessities of his position amongst some of the lowest types of womanhood both in London and America, how could it have been otherwise? Years after, when wisdom had ripened his judgment, this is how he alludes to this incident:

When I was a young man in my twenties I had an experience like yours. I resolved to take the part of some people who were disliked in the place where I lived. I thought that those who disliked them were morally wrong, and so I argued boldly for them, and went over to their side. . . . The real feeling was a national sentiment, jealous love of country, moral questions much larger than those I have been arguing about which really caused the whole trouble.

We are told that these social eccentricities laid him open to adverse criticism, and made his position in Cincinnati untenable. Only those, however, who know what journalism is in the United States, with its relentless competition, its striving for emolument and place, can conceive the unpopularity of, from their point of view, an alien,' who by his proficiency, had deprived them of a chance of promotion. When, added to this, he endeavoured to introduce reforms into the American methods of punctuation, and to assimilate them more closely to the English standard, for which in derision he was given the nickname of Old Semicolon,' we can easily understand his being viewed with no favour by his comrades.

With a picked few he formed the closest ties of intimacy. It is to his friendship with Krehbiel that we owe the delightful series of letters written from New Orleans and the West Indies. The transparent sincerity and spontaneous expression, diversified with flashes of deeper thought, that enliven these pages raise them into the position of masterpieces in the epistolary style.

Some, with their practical instructions in literary labour, might be used as a manual by young authors.

Have you ever worked much with Roget's Thesaurus? It is invaluable ; still more valuable are etymological dictionaries. . . . Such books give one that subtle sense of words to which much that startles in poetry and prose is due. . . . In art study you should feel the determination of those Neophytes of Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly abandoned in darkness and rising water, whence there was no escape save by an iron ladder. As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had quitted it and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the climber. . . . All this might seem absurd, perhaps to a purely practical mind, but there is a practical side also. Do your best now, your very, very best; the century must recognise the artist if he is there. If he is not recognised, it is because he is not there.. you must succeed if you make the sacrifice of work

ing for art's sake alone. If you only knew the pain and labour I have to create; there are months when I cannot write . . . the thought will not come.

Thus, by unceasing labour, did Hearn attain that extraordinary dexterity in handling English prose, that dignity of ease and style that in his last book, Japan: an Interpretation, has reached its full perfection, carrying the reader along as if borne on the bosom of a full, deep-flowing river. He has the power of conjuring up a scene, bringing it before our eyes with a vividness of presentment that fairly captures the senses. When he describes the old palace, his residence in New Orleans, 'we see its huge archway, the courtyard with its banana palms, their giant leaves splitting in ribbons in the sun, the hoary dog sleeping like a stone sphinx, we hear the echo of his footsteps as he passes across the cold, cheerless rooms, vast with emptiness.'

I have been tempted in this essay to give more biographical details than I had at first intended, but gradually genealogical details, and as much evidence as possible on his early years and the development of his character and genius, were found necessary to disprove the misrepresentations which have been made about Lafcadio Hearn. In America he has become as legendary a person as was Shelley in England eighty years ago.

The reason for this to a great extent was his reserve towards the general public, and his manner of dropping those whom he had known, one by one, or of letting them drop him, which came to the same thing. By some this unwarranted estrangement was bitterly resented, and has led to much unfavourable criticism of his life and aims. we study the question, however, we shall see that this quality of socalled inconstancy to his friends was rather constancy to his art-to the best that was in him.

If

To one for whom he cherished the deepest affection to the end he writes :

I am going to ask you simply not to come.

I wonder if my friend will stand this with equanimity. He says that he will never misunderstand. I am

only fearing that understanding in this case might be even worse than misunderstanding, and I can't make a masterpiece yet; if I could, I should not seem to be putting on airs. That almost is the worst of it!

The very simplicity of his life in the East made it the more mysterious to those accustomed to the luxury and complexity of Western civilisation. He ate rice and lotus with chopsticks, and wrote a study, marvellous in its impartiality and erudition, of one of the people most difficult to understand on the face of the earth. He slept on a wooden pillow, Japanese fashion, and dreamed exquisite dreams. Seated on a mat on the floor, he wrote these dreams down, for the delight of mankind, in the most lucid and artistic language.

As to his disputes with publishers, it is the old story; a publisher's refusal to give what the author asks, and the author's refusal to conform to the publisher's requirements. Alden,' he writes, "has refused my Shadowings and Retrospects, and the Century have rejected a sketch and asked me to send them something "snappy." To such a soul as his, sensitive to an almost abnormal point, such treatment as this would sting him to an anguish of resentment and bitterness— then it was that he would take up that 'pen of fire' and write sentences charged with volcanic energy.

There are certain catch-words and phrases used in relation to Lafcadio Hearn that show how misinformed the general public is yet as to the vital facts connected with his genius and life. One writer expresses his profound pity for a man whose life was marred by sightlessness and lovelessness.' Hearn's keenness of vision, in spite of the loss of one eye and the near-sightedness of the other, remains a problem only to be solved by the sensitiveness of the perceptions of genius. One minute,' as his wife says, 'was the whole time of his observation; still he saw everything.' As to his 'lovelessness,' let us study carefully his fourteen years' residence in Japan. We may hold what opinion we like upon the subject of the marriage of one of our race with an Oriental. Hearn is not alone amongst Westerners in thinking the sweet, childish, unselfish Japanese woman a much more lovable creature than the superb, calculating, penetrating Occidental Circe of our more artificial society.'

'I have at home,' he writes, a little world of about eleven people to whom I am everything. It is a very gentle world. Only happy when I am happy. If I ever look tired it is silent and walks on tiptoe. I dare not fret about anything or others would fret more.'

What was ever nobler than his renunciation of his post as English Instructor at the Japanese College? It could not be held by any but an Englishman, and he had made up his mind, for the sake of legalising his marriage and legitimatising his children, to nationalise himself a Japanese. He never seemed to doubt the necessity of this step, though it reduced him to beggary.

Of criticism worth the name Hearn has as yet had none. The

artist must be judged by the completeness of his work, a man by the end of his life. Gradually the turbid waters settled into purity and calm. 'I can't find pleasure in a French novel, written for the obvious purpose of appealing to instincts that interfere with perception of higher things. I would not go to see the Paris Opera if it were next door, and I had a free ticket.'

Thoroughly did he learn the lesson that life had to teach him. Out of sickness, suffering, and want, through contempt and betrayal, through sneers and abuse did his tuition come. Never was the lesson shirked, never was the experience slurred over; in the end he proved that in spite of almost overwhelming disabilities, physical, moral, and mental, success is to him who tramples self under foot, victory to the worker !

During the last years of his life Hearn had a pathetic yearning for recognition in the English literary world. 'You will be pleased to hear that my books are attracting considerable attention in England now,' he writes. It is very hard to win attention there, but much more important than to win it in America.' It gives one a thrill of compunction to find this great artist writing, after thirty years of hard work, 'My average earnings for the last three years have been scarcely 500 dollars a year. I shall get along somehow, but I am so very tired of being hard pushed, and ignored, and starved, obliged to undergo moral humiliations, which are much worse than hunger or cold.'

...

Granted that he never learnt those economies which make a balance between expenditure and income, that he always, as he said himself, remained a veritable blunderer in the ways of the world,' is there no indebtedness on our part, no gratitude, that ought to make us English people more kindly, less uncharitable, in our judgment of Patricio Lafcadio Hearn, our own kith and kin?

It always seems to me that a country ought to honour him who devotes heart and brain to perfecting her language, to filtering and handing it down intact to future generations as much as she honours him who dies on the field of battle for her sake.

NINA KENNARD.