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Transcriber's Note

Footnotes have been placed at the end of each paragraph in which they
are referenced.

There are several captioned photographs, which are indicated as
[Illustration: Caption]. Hearn also included in his letters small
sketches. Their approximate positions are indicated with [Illustration].
Any handwritten text in those sketches is included here as captions.

Italic text is denoted with underscores as _italic_. There is a small
amount of Greek which is transliterated and enclosed in brackets as
[Larkadie]. The characters 'o', 'a' and 'u' appear with a macron, a
straight bar atop the letter. These use the '=' sign as 'T[=o]ky[=o]'.

The occasional superscript is simply left inline (e.g., 'nth'). The use
of subscripts is limited to a single instance. The underscore character
indicates this: L_3 H_9 NG_4.

The sole instance of the 'oe' ligature is given as is seen here:
'onomatopoeia'.

Some corrections were made where printer's errors were most likely,
as described in the Note at the end of the text. Other than those
corrections, no changes to spelling have been made. Hyphenation of
words at line or page breaks are removed if other instances of the word
warrant it.

This book was published in two volumes, of which this is the first.
The second volume was released as Project Gutenberg ebook #42313,
available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42313.




       +--------------------------------------------------------+
       |                  By Lafcadio Hearn                     |
       |                                                        |
       | THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY, AND OTHER STUDIES AND    |
       |     STORIES. 12mo, gilt top, $1.25 _net._ Postage      |
       |    extra.                                              |
       |                                                        |
       | KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. With   |
       |    two Japanese Illustrations. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50.  |
       |                                                        |
       | GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.     |
       |                                                        |
       | KOKORO. Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. 16mo, |
       |     gilt top, $1.25.                                   |
       |                                                        |
       | OUT OF THE EAST. Reveries and Studies in New Japan.    |
       |     16mo, $1.25.                                       |
       |                                                        |
       | GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN. 2 vols. crown 8vo, gilt  |
       |    top, $4.00.                                         |
       |                                                        |
       | STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE. 16mo, $1.50.     |
       |                                                        |
       |                                                        |
       |               HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.                  |
       |                BOSTON AND NEW YORK.                    |
       +--------------------------------------------------------+




             LIFE AND LETTERS OF LAFCADIO HEARN

                           VOLUME I

[Illustration: Lafcadio Hearn]

                     THE LIFE AND LETTERS

                             OF

                       LAFCADIO HEARN

                             BY

                     ELIZABETH BISLAND

                    _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_

                       IN TWO VOLUMES

                           VOL. I

[Illustration: The Riverside Press]

                    BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
              The Riverside Press Cambridge

        COPYRIGHT 1906 BY ELIZABETH BISLAND WETMORE

                    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                 _Published December 1906_




PREFACE

In the course of the preparation of these volumes there was gradually
accumulated so great a number of the letters written by Lafcadio Hearn
during twenty-five years of his life, and these letters proved of so
interesting a nature, that eventually the plan of the whole work was
altered. The original intention was that they should serve only to
illuminate the general text of the biography, but as their number and
value became more apparent it was evident that to reproduce them in full
would make the book both more readable and more illustrative of the
character of the man than anything that could possibly be related of
him.

No biographer could have so vividly pictured the modesty and
tender-heartedness, the humour and genius of the man as he has
unconsciously revealed these qualities in unstudied communications to
his friends. Happily--in these days when the preservation of letters is
a rare thing--almost every one to whom he wrote appeared instinctively
to treasure--even when he was still unknown--every one of his
communications, though here and there regrettable gaps occur, owing to
the accidents of changes of residence, three of which, as every one
knows, are more destructive of such treasures than a fire. To all of his
correspondents who have so generously contributed their treasured
letters I wish to express my sincere thanks. Especially is gratitude due
to Professor Masanubo Otani, of the Shinshu University of T[=o]ky[=o],
for the painstaking accuracy and fulness of the information he
contributed as to the whole course of Hearn's life in Japan.

The seven fragments of autobiographical reminiscence, discovered after
Hearn's death, added to the letters, narrowed my task to little more
than the recording of dates and such brief comments and explanations as
were required for the better comprehension of his own contributions to
the book.

Naturally some editing of the letters has been necessary. Such parts as
related purely to matters of business have been deleted as uninteresting
to the general public; many personalities, usually both witty and
trenchant, have been omitted, not only because such personalities are
matters of confidence between the writer and his correspondent, a
confidence which death does not render less inviolable, but also because
the dignity and privacy of the living have every claim to respect.
Robert Browning's just resentment at the indiscreet editing of the
FitzGerald Letters is a warning that should be heeded, and it is
moreover certain that Lafcadio Hearn himself would have been profoundly
unwilling to have any casual criticism of either the living or the dead
given public record. Of those who had been his friends he always spoke
with tenderness and respect, and I am but following what I know to be
his wishes in omitting all references to his enemies.

That such a definite and eccentric person as he should make enemies was
of course unavoidable. If any of these retain their enmity to one who
has passed into the sacred helplessness of death, and are inclined to
think that the mere outline sketch of the man contained in the following
pages lacks the veracity of shadow, my answer is this: In the first
place, I have taken heed of the opinion he himself has expressed in one
of his letters: "I believe we ought not to speak of the weaknesses of
very great men"--and the intention of such part of this book as is my
own is to give a history of the circumstances under which a great man
developed his genius. I have purposely ignored all such episodes as
seemed impertinent to this end, as from my point of view there seems a
sort of gross curiosity in raking among such details of a man's life as
he himself would wish ignored. These I gladly leave to those who enjoy
such labours.

In the second place, there is no art more difficult than that of making
a portrait satisfactory to every one, for the limner of a man, whether
he use pen or pigments, can--if he be honest--only transfer to the
canvas the lineaments as he himself sees them. _How_ he sees them
depends not only upon his own temperament, but also upon the aspect
which the subject of the picture would naturally turn towards such a
temperament. For every one of us is aware of a certain chameleon-like
quality within ourselves which causes us to take on a protective
colouring assimilative to our surroundings, and we all, like the husband
in Browning's verse,

                     "Boast two soul-sides,"...

which is the explanation, no doubt, of the apparently irreconcilable
impressions carried away by a man's acquaintances.

Which soul-side was the real man must finally resolve itself into a
matter of opinion. Henley, probably, honestly believed the real
Stevenson to be as he represented him, but the greater number of those
who knew and loved the artist will continue to form their estimate of
the man from his letters and books, and to them Henley's diatribe will
continue to seem but the outbreak of a mean jealousy, which could not
tolerate the lifting up of a companion for the world's admiration.

Of the subject of this memoir there certainly exists more than one
impression, but the writer can but depict the man as he revealed himself
throughout twenty years of intimate acquaintance, and for confirmation
of this opinion can only refer to the work he has left for all the world
to judge him by, and to the intimate revelations of thoughts, opinions,
and feelings contained in his letters.

                                                             E. B.




                           CONTENTS


  INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

          I. BOYHOOD                                      3

         II. THE ARTIST'S APPRENTICESHIP                 40

        III. THE MASTER WORKMAN                         103

         IV. THE LAST STAGE                             136

  LETTERS                                               165




                         ILLUSTRATIONS


  LAFCADIO HEARN (photogravure)                _Frontispiece_
          From a photograph taken about 1900.

  LAFCADIO HEARN                                         50
          From a photograph taken about 1873.

  LAFCADIO HEARN AND MITCHELL MCDONALD                  110

  LAFCADIO HEARN                                        198
          From a photograph taken in the '70's.

  FACSIMILE OF MR. HEARN'S EARLIER HANDWRITING          340

  SAINT-PIERRE AND MT. PELEE                            410
          From a photograph in the possession of
          Dr. T. A. Jaggar, Jr.




                       INTRODUCTORY SKETCH


                           CHAPTER I

                            BOYHOOD


Lafcadio Hearn was born on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1850.
He was a native of the Ionian Isles, the place of his birth being the
Island of Santa Maura, which is commonly called in modern Greek Levkas,
or Lefcada, a corruption of the name of the old Leucadia, which was
famous as the place of Sappho's self-destruction. This island is
separated from the western coast of Greece by a narrow strait; the neck
of land which joined it to the mainland having been cut through by the
Corinthians seven centuries before Christ. To this day it remains deeply
wooded, and scantily populated, with sparse vineyards and olive groves
clinging to the steep sides of the mountains overlooking the blue Ionian
sea. The child Lafcadio may have played in his early years among the
high-set, half-obliterated ruins of the Temple of Apollo, from whence
offenders were cast down with multitudes of birds tied to their limbs,
that perchance the beating of a thousand wings might break the violence
of the fall, and so rescue them from the last penalty of expiation.

In this place of old tragedies and romance the child was born into a
life always to be shadowed by tragedy and romance to an extent almost
fantastic in our modern workaday world. This wild, bold background,
swimming in the half-tropical blue of Greek sea and sky, against which
the boy first discerned the vague outlines of his conscious life, seems
to have silhouetted itself behind all his later memories and
prepossessions, and through whatever dark or squalid scenes his
wanderings led, his heart was always filled by dreams and longings for
soaring outlines, and the blue, "which is the colour of the idea of the
divine, the colour pantheistic, the colour ethical."

Long years afterward, in the "Dream of a Summer Day," he says:--

"I have memory of a place and a magical time, in which the sun and the
moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or
of some life before, I cannot tell, but I know the sky was very much
more blue, and nearer to the world--almost as it seems to become above
the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer.... The sea was
alive and used to talk--and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it
touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived among
the peaks, I have dreamed for a moment the same wind was blowing--but it
was only a remembrance.

"Also in that place the clouds were wonderful and of colours for which
there are no names at all,--colours that used to make me hungry and
thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer than
these days,--and every day there were new pleasures and new wonders for
me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought
only of ways to make me happy.... When day was done, and there fell the
great hush of light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made
me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other
stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she
would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there
came a parting day; and she wept and told me of a charm she had given
that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give
me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one
day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old."

A strange mingling of events and of race-forces had brought the boy into
being.

Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, of the 76th Foot, came of an old
Dorsetshire family in which there was a tradition of gipsy blood--a
tradition too dim and ancient now to be verified, though Hearn is an old
Romany name in the west of England, and the boy Lafcadio bore in his
hand all his life that curious "thumb-print" upon the palm, which is
said to be the invariable mark of Romany descent. The first of the
Hearns to pass over into Ireland went as private chaplain to the Lord
Lieutenant in 1693, and being later appointed Dean of Cashel, settled
permanently in West Meath. From the ecclesiastical loins there appears
to have sprung a numerous race of soldiers, for Dr. Hearn's father and
seven uncles served under Wellington in Spain. The grandfather of
Lafcadio rose during the Peninsula Campaign to the position of
lieutenant-colonel of the 43d regiment, and commanded his regiment in
the battle of Vittoria. Later he married Elizabeth Holmes, a kinswoman
of Sir Robert Holmes, and of Edmund Holmes the poet, another member of
her family being Rice Holmes, the historian of the Indian Mutiny. Dr.
Charles Hearn, the father of Lafcadio, was her eldest son, and another
son was Richard, who was one of the Barbizon painters and an intimate
friend of Jean Francois Millet.

It was in the late '40's, when England still held the Ionian Isles, that
the 76th Foot was ordered to Greece, and Surgeon-Major Hearn accompanied
his regiment to do garrison duty on the island of Cerigo. Apparently not
long after his arrival he made the acquaintance of Rosa Cerigote, whose
family is said to have been of old and honourable Greek descent.
Photographs of the young surgeon represent him as a handsome man, with
the flowing side-whiskers so valued at that period, and with a bold
profile and delicate waist. A passionate love affair ensued between the
beautiful Greek girl and the handsome Irishman, but the connection was
violently opposed by the girl's brothers, the native bitterness toward
the English garrison being as intense as was the sentiment in the South
against the Northern army of occupation immediately after the American
Civil War. The legend goes that the Cerigote men--there was hot blood in
the family veins--waylaid and stabbed the Irishman, leaving him for
dead. The girl, it is said, with the aid of a servant, concealed him in
a barn and nursed him back to life, and after his recovery eloped with
her grateful lover and married him by the Greek rites in Santa Maura.
The first child died immediately after birth, and the boy, Lafcadio, was
the second child; taking his name from the Greek name of the island,
Lefcada. Another son, James, three years later in Cephalonia, was the
fruit of this marriage, so romantically begun and destined to end so
tragically.

When England ceded the Ionian Isles to Greece Dr. Hearn returned with
his family to Dublin, pausing, perhaps, for a while at Malta, for in a
letter written during the last years of his life Lafcadio says: "I am
almost sure of having been in Malta as a child. My father told me queer
things about the old palaces of the knights, and a story of a monk who
on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold
chancel railing with green paint."

The two boys were at this time aged six and three. It was inevitable, no
doubt, that the young wife, who had never mastered the English tongue,
though she spoke, as did the children, Italian and Romaic, should have
regretted the change from her sunlit island to the dripping Irish skies
and grey streets of Dublin, nor can it be wondered at that, an exile
among aliens in race, speech, and faith, there should have soon grown up
misunderstandings and disputes. The unhappy details have died into
silence with the passage of time, but the wife seems to have believed
herself repudiated and betrayed, and the marriage being eventually
annulled, she fled to Smyrna with a Greek cousin who had come at her
call, leaving the two children with the father. This cousin she
afterwards married and her children knew her no more. The father also
married again, and the boy Lafcadio being