had been a demophobe for years, hating
crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here
I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help
it;--just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall
want to be very well hidden away in New York,--to see no one except you
and Joe."

It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this
sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him
in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had
not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment
and feeling must have arisen between them in that space of ten years,
subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the
passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters
transmitted across thousands of miles.

Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in
argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was
inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and
gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in
the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn,
Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of
her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had
lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for
thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion.

Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental
tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel
correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths
and Vandals--and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that
Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the
fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan
art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that
claims art merit by a Gothic standard.

From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public
by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely
for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of
the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on
the other hand--no musician from a technical point of view--frankly
declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's
son