LETTERS from the RAVEN and DIARY of an IMPRESSIONIST by Lafcadio Hearn

'In the district called Toïchi of Yamato province, there used to live a gōshi named Miyata Akinosuké'; and so on through some twenty pages, telling a mystical legend of old Japan in a lovely and melodious English style.This was the writer's first introduction to Lafcadio Hearn, known to him up to that time only by a somewhat formidable repute as 'the best interpreter of Japan,' and mentally scheduled for perusal on a convenient opportunity which had never come. Since then Hearn's...
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'In the district called Toïchi of Yamato province, there used to live a gōshi named Miyata Akinosuké'; and so on through some twenty pages, telling a mystical legend of old Japan in a lovely and melodious English style.This was the writer's first introduction to Lafcadio Hearn, known to him up to that time only by a somewhat formidable repute as 'the best interpreter of Japan,' and mentally scheduled for perusal on a convenient opportunity which had never come. Since then Hearn's twenty volumes have been read and reread; there has been correspondence with his family and friends and with some who were not his friends; his complicated life has been investigated in detail; yet the sharpness, the intensity, of that first experience of his quality is not blurred. The impression that persists is that of weird, sad, delicious savor, of ghostly thrill.This is not the place in which to retell in detail the romantic story of Hearn's oddly characteristic life; but if we briefly recall its main outlines in relation to the parallel outlines of his work; we shall perhaps find an added interest and significance in the examples of his early writing hereinafter collected.Born in that Ionian Isle where Sappho destroyed herself for love; the child of an Irishman and a Greek, with an added strain of gypsy bloody Hearn first takes on a human tangibility when we find him deserted by his parents and living in the ultra-religious household of a great-aunt in Wales, a little dark-eyed, dark-faced, passionate boy, 'with a wound in his heart and gold rings in his ears.' In the fragments of autobiography dealing with this time, which Mrs. Wetmore has printed, we find his visionary little mind occupied with highly significant images,--the horrors of hell-fire, ghosts, and 'the breasts of nymphs in the brake,' soon to be blotted out from the plates in his favorite book by the priest who had his education in charge.After a romantic though somewhat vague Odyssey of misfortune, Hearn finally emerges in Cincinnati at the age of twenty as 'Old Semi-Colon' a proof-reader and budding journalist by profession, a 'flame-hearted' artist in words by aspiration. His appearance at this time, as a striking bearded portrait shows, was that of a Parisian poet not yet 'arrived'; and that side of his temperament, which later made him style himself, half in irony, half in penitence, 'a vicious, French-hearted scalawag,' was then, perhaps, most restive. He attended spiritualistic séances, he tried a little opium, and made other fantastic experiments in life. But these are topics that need not concern us here. The important point is that with the Cincinnati period the tale of Hearn's career as a literary artist begins. He devours' Hoffmann and writes marvelous murder-stories for the Sunday edition of his paper; he studies the methods of those great prosateurs, Flaubert and Gautier; and finally, before leaving Cincinnati in 1877, he completes the translation of the tales of Gautier which he published some years later as 'One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances.'In conveying the flavor of a strongly-flavored writer the work was singularly successful. It was dedicated 'To the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, the lovers of artistic beauty and artistic truth.' A dedication to the lovers of macabre would have been more appropriate. In his choice of tales, in his gusto in the rendering of certain passages, in the 'flowers of the yew' which he thought best to add in an appendix, Hearn showed himself more macabresque than his master.In 1877, Hearn, following apparently some temperamental attraction, moved to New Orleans.