The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 10

Perhaps I might go to Niigata during the summer. Setsu is always, always, always talking about Tokyo. I suppose I shall have to take her there. And I want to visit Kompira, and Zenkoji in Nagano (?)--where all the Souls of the Dead go,--and one might do all that and see Niigata too. I am very anxious to see the dear kind Governor and his daughter again. That kind of Governor is rare, and I think will soon cease to exist in j.a.pan. He always seemed to me a delightful type of the old days,--like the princes of the _ehon_: the modernized Governor scarcely seems to belong to the same race. And the j.a.panese of the next generation will not be kind and open-hearted and unselfish, I fear: they will become hard of character like the Western people,--more intellectual and less moral. For old j.a.pan, in unselfishness, was as far in advance of the West as she was materially behind it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SHINTO TEMPLE OF KIZUKI]

The curling-up of the toe in the statue of Inada-Hime is not according to the canons of Western sculpture (which is still generally governed by the Greek spirit),--because it shows the member in what is considered an ungraceful position. But I thought after looking awhile at it, that it was really natural. Not natural from the standpoint of a modern people whose toes have lost both symmetry and flexibility owing to the wearing of leather shoes; but natural among a people whose feet are well shaped and whose toes remain supple, and to some degree, prehensile. Among tropical races the toes retain extraordinary flexibility; but I don't think any English girl could put her great-toe into the att.i.tude taken by that of Inada-Hime. I imagined that this movement represented in the statue a little nervous feeling,--the involuntary shrinking of a woman from sharp cold steel. But that is only a guess. What it really means I should like to know.

I forgot in another letter to tell you that Herbert Spencer, in one of his recent volumes ("Individual Life") severely criticized some of the Mombusho Readers and other publications as immoral,--because appealing to the desire of revenge and the pa.s.sion of hatred and bloodshed.... One thing is certain, that Readers for j.a.panese students ought to be edited in j.a.pan, and edited in a particular manner with especial reference to national character and feeling. I prize the Mombusho Readers, because I learn so much from them; but as text-books they are not well written, and they do not appeal to the student's natural love of novelty. It is hopeless to interest boys in stories they know already by heart in their own language. They want what is new and strange and beautiful.--But no thanks will ever be given to the man who tries to do the work well; and his work itself will almost certainly be spoiled by the emendations and interpolations of a committee of men without knowledge or taste,--unless the thing should be done quite independently of officialdom.

I am trying to teach Setsu English by a fast memory-system. I can't tell whether I will succeed or not: if I find it strains her too much I must stop,--for the system is exhausting. In the course of teaching I notice something of what you tell me about Izumo p.r.o.nunciation. It makes the difficulty much greater.

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, February, 1893.

DEAR HENDRICK,--This is not going to be a pleasant letter,--though it may have interest for you. I don't hesitate to tell my friends about shadows as well as lights, and I rather think the latter alone would cease to be interesting. Besides, we are all most interested in what most closely relates to the realities of life; and the realities of life are ugly to no small degree. Dreams are realities--of desire for things out of reach; but the diet of dreams is not substantial enough for the sense of friendship to live upon. So here goes for the lamentations,--or as a Frenchman would say, a _jeremiade_....

I might cite a fourth, a fifth;--but happily there are lights. I made one delightful friend here, Professor Chamberlain, and I told you about Major McDonald....

I am perfectly conscious that to a thorough man of the world I must be only a contemptible fool. Even to a friend like you who are not spoiled and cannot be spoiled by your _milieu_, I must seem something of a fool.

Be that as it may,--here I am. Now what is this fool to do?...

Suppose I should seek a place as teacher of English literature.

Everybody thinks he can teach English literature, and the public doesn't care particularly: it takes its pabulum largely on trust. On whose trust? Oh! the trust of the trustees,--and the respectable people.

Now I am not respectable. I am under the _odium theologic.u.m_ of every Christian faith. Small and mean as I am, I am spotted. Don't imagine this is vanity! It doesn't require any greatness to be spotted. It is just like a prost.i.tute trying to become an honest woman, or a convicted thief endeavouring to get employment. There is nothing great about it.

If I had any position worth hunting up, the cry would be raised that an atheist, a debauchee, a disreputable ex-reporter was corrupting the morals of the young under pretence of teaching literature. That is position No. 3. As Fiske says, the heretic is not now burned at the stake; but there is an organized policy to starve him by injuring his reputation and lying about him. And even Fiske (because he is poor) dares not take the whole position of Spencer.

But I don't want to pretend myself a martyr for any worthy cause. I am not. I am _not respectable_: that is the whole matter,--and the pardoning influence of women would never be exerted for me, because I am physically disagreeable,--and what I could win by my own merit I could not keep, because I have no aggressiveness and no cunning. And I am only now learning all this,--with my hair grey. There is no chance of becoming independent, as I will never be allowed to hold a position that pays well. I shall never be able to do my best in literary matters; for I shall never have the leisure, the means, or the opportunities of travel I want....

To all this _jeremiade_, then, you must think for reply, in the words of Herbert Spencer: "My dear friend, the first necessity for success in life is to be a good animal. As an animal you don't work well at all.

Furthermore you are out of harmony mentally and morally with the life of society: you represent broken-down tissue. There is some good in the ghostly part of you, but it would never have been developed under comfortable circ.u.mstances. Hard knocks and intellectual starvation have brought your miserable little _animula_ into some sort of shape. It will never have full opportunity to express itself, doubtless; but perhaps that is better. It might otherwise make too many mistakes; and it has not sufficient original force to move the sea of human mind to any storm of aspiration. Perhaps, in some future state of--" But here Spencer stops....

I think civilization is a fraud, because I don't like the hopeless struggle. If I were very rich I should perhaps think quite differently--or, what would be still more rational, try not to think at all about it. Religion under an empire preaches the divinity of autocracy; under a monarchy, the divinity of aristocracy. In this industrial epoch it is the servant of the monster business, and is paid to declare that religion is governed by G.o.d, and business by religion,--"whoever says the contrary, let him be anathema!" Business has its fixed standard of hypocrisy; everything above or below that is to be denounced by the ministers of the gospel of G.o.d and business.

Hence the howl about Jay Gould, who, with splendid, brutal frankness, exposed to the entire universe the real laws of business,--without any preaching at all,--and overrode society and law and became supreme.

Wherefore I hold that a statue should be erected to him. Here we have been having a newspaper fight. All the missionaries are down on "that anonymous writer" as usual. I wrote an article to prove that Gould was the grandest moral teacher of the century. Even sermons were preached in Tokyo denouncing the writer of that article. I was accused of declaring that the end justified the means. I had not said so; but I quoted American authorities to show Gould had created and made effective the railroad-transportation system of the West; and then I quoted English financial authorities to prove that that very transportation system alone was now saving the United States from bankruptcy. The facts were unanswerable (at least by the clerics); and they proved that in order to get power to save a whole nation from ruin,--Gould had to ruin a few thousand people. Wherefore I am called "immoral, low, beastly."

n.o.body _knows_ it is I; but some suspect. I am already deemed the "moral plague-spot" of j.a.pan by the dear missionaries. Next week I'll try them with an article on "The Abomination of Civilization." ...

But I have at home a little world of about eleven people, to whom I am Love and Light and Food. It is a very gentle world. It is only happy when I am happy. If I even look tired, it is silent, and walks on tiptoe. It is a moral force. I dare not fret about anything when I can help it,--for others would fret more. So I try to keep right. My little wife and I have saved nearly 2000 j.a.panese dollars between us. I think I'll be able to make her independent. When I've done that, I can let the teaching go, and wander about awhile, and write "sketches" at $10 per page.

Ever affectionately, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, April, 1893.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... You never wrote a more wonderful letter than that last letter full of penetrating things. Now one of my shortcomings is a total ignorance of practical worldly wisdom;--for instance, I could not sit down and talk to a man in polite enigmas which both of us would understand, at all. All that world of business is to me a mystery and a marvel incomprehensible. Moreover, it is the revelation of mental powers of a very subtle order, as much beyond me as mathematics,--so that I cannot but respect the forces manifested, even if I deplore the directions in which they are sometimes exercised. Your sketch of the two men, and the interview, and the psychological relations was perfectly delicious,--and like nearly everything you write to me, gave me the pleasure of a novel sensation....

Your criticism about ----'s criticism was not exactly what I thought you might make:--it _is_ true that we like to be thought, and to believe ourselves, capable of doing vast harm, and credit ourselves more for our goodness perhaps on account of that belief. But I don't agree with you in thinking the remark uncomplimentary. I think it was true, and in the sense I take it, beautiful. Ask yourself could you really do anything you knew to be terribly cruel under any personal provocation,--at least after the first burst of sudden anger was over? And you will find you _could not_. Any nature sincerely sympathetic--with a complex nerve-system--cannot inflict pain without receiving at least as much, if not more pain than it gives. I believe you could kill a man, under just provocation; but that is not bad, or cruel--indeed, it might be a duty. The terrible men are the men who do everything in cold blood, icily, with calculation, infinite patience, and infinite pleasure. But the capacity to be thus dangerous means also a low development of those qualities which give sweetness to character and amiability to life,--and chivalry to a man's soul.

Now here is the very immoral side of Western civilization. Being wholly aggressive and selfish, the hard, cold qualities of character are being prodigiously developed by it. The emotional qualities, you might suggest, are also indirectly developed by the suffering the others inflict;--there is action and reaction. Yes, that is true. But the terrible men--the men of the type of that manager--represent not only a constantly increasing cla.s.s, but a leading one--the cla.s.s whose name is Power. Now Power multiplies. In wealth and luxury multiplication is rapid and facile. They are less fertile comparatively than other cla.s.ses; but the cost of their individuality is infinitely greater, and one type can outlive, outwork, outplan a hundred of the emotional sort,--as a general rule. The ultimate tendency is to settle all power in the hands of those without moral scruple. It may take another few centuries to do this; but the tendency is obvious, and the danger is steadily growing. I think the West can never become as moral as the Orient. But it may become infinitely more wicked.

This is one way of seeing the matter. Another I wrote you about in my last letter,--the s.e.xual question in the West,--something never dreamed of in the East. What must be the ultimate results of this Western worship of the Eternal Feminine? Must not one be, the contempt of old age, and universal irreverence for things the most naturally deserving of reverence? Already, in the West, the Family has almost ceased to exist.

To an Oriental it seems utterly monstrous that grown-up children should not live with their father, mother, and grandparents, and support and love them more than their own children, wives, or husbands. It seems to him sheer wickedness that a man should not love his mother-in-law,--or that he should love his own wife even half as well as his own father or mother. Our whole existence seems to him disgustingly immoral. He would deem worthy of death the man who wrote--

"He stood on his head on the wild seash.o.r.e, And joy was the cause of the act;-- For he felt, as he never had felt before, Insanely glad, in fact.

And why? Because on that selfsame day His mother-in-law had sailed To a tropical climate, far away, _Where tigers and snakes prevailed_."

He first most loves his father,--then his mother,--then his father-in-law and mother-in-law,--then his children,--and lastly, his wife. His wife is not of the family proper,--a stranger,--not of the blood of the ancestors,--how can he love her like his own parents!

Now I half suspect the Oriental is right.

To him the people of the West with their novels and poems about love seem a race of very lascivious people. If indeed he should think more kindly of them at all, it would be through pity,--as a race of s.e.xually starved beings, frantic with nymphomania and all forms of erotomania, through refusal to obey the laws of nature. "They talk about their wives!--they write novels about their l.u.s.ts!--they do not support their parents!--they do not obey their mothers-in-law! Truly they are savages!" Now they write love-stories in j.a.pan. But who are the women of these love-stories? Dancing-girls. "If one must write stories about the pa.s.sion of s.e.x, let him at least not write such things about wives and daughters of honest men--let him write about wh.o.r.es! A wh.o.r.e's business is to excite pa.s.sion. That of a pure woman is to quench it.

What horribly immoral people the Western people are!"

--Don Juan is the imagination of the West. No j.a.panese Don Juan--no Chinese Don Juan--ever existed or could exist. He is a common type at home. But the Orient rejoices also in exemption from one of the most terrible creations of Western life;--no Oriental is haunted by "the Woman thou shalt never know."

What a curse and a delusion is that beautiful spectre! How many lives she makes desolate! How many crimes does she inspire, "the Woman thou shalt never know!"--the impossible ideal, not of love, but of artistic pa.s.sion, pursued by warm hearts from youth till age, always in vain.

As her pursuer grows more old, she becomes ever more young and fair.

He waits for her through the years,--waits till his hair is grey.

Then,--wifeless, childless, blase, ennuye, cynical, misanthropic,--he looks in the gla.s.s and finds that he has been cheated out of youth and life. But does he give up the chase? No!--the hair of Lilith--just one--has been twisted round his heart,--an ever-tightening fine spider-line of gold. And he sees her smile just ere he pa.s.ses into the Eternal darkness.

Then again, our social morals! We never in the West talk to people of their duties. Do orators make speeches about duties? Do any, except priests, talk about social duties? But what do we talk to the people about? We talk to them about their _rights_,--"by G--d!" Always, incessantly, _ad nauseam_, about their _rights_. Now to talk to people who know nothing of social science, of political economy, of ethical ideas in their relation to eternal truths,--to talk to such people about their _rights_, is like giving a new-born baby a razor to play with. Or putting a loaded revolver in the hands of a mischievous child.

Or inviting a crowd of urchins to make a bonfire in the immediate vicinity of ten thousand barrels of gunpowder. And the Oriental knows this. (Wherefore in China it was a law that he who should say or invent anything new should be put to death,--an extreme view of the necessities of the case, but not much more extreme than our own philistinism.)

The j.a.panese of the new school do not, however, keep to the Chinese wisdom. They show evidence now of a desire to put to death those who say anything older than yesterday. They are becoming infected with the Western moral poison. They are beginning to love their wives more than their fathers and mothers;--it is much cheaper....

By the way, I am in a world of new sensations. My first child will be born, I expect, about September next. The rest of my family have come from Matsue,--father-in-law, father's father also, a nice old man of 84.

We are now all together. There is universal joy because of the birth in prospect. And I am accused of not seeming joyful enough. I am not sorry. But I hope my little one will never have to face life in the West, but may always dwell in a Buddhist atmosphere.

Ever most faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, April, 1893.

DEAR HENDRICK,--Your most welcome lines of March 1 came to me during a lonesome spring vacation--to brighten it up. Your wish about a j.a.panese love-story has been partly answered in the March _Atlantic_; and in the June number, you will have a paper of mine, ent.i.tled the "j.a.panese Smile," which you will find as philosophical as you could wish.--No, I have been working well, but for a book only; and of that book only five or six chapters can be published in a magazine. I am not yet sure if the book will be published in the shape I want,--although the publishers show some signs of yielding.

So much for me. I was too egotistic last time, and will not be so much so again, unless I get a very awful attack of the blues within the next five years....

To return to j.a.pan and j.a.panese life. What do you think of the following? It happened near k.u.mamoto. A peasant went to consult an astrologer what to do for his mother's eyes: she had become blind. The astrologer said that she would get her sight back if she could eat a little human liver,--taken fresh and from a young body. The peasant went home crying, and told his wife. She said: "We have only one boy.

He is beautiful. You can get another wife as good, or better than I, very easily, but might never be able to get another son. Therefore, you must kill me instead of the son, and give my liver to your mother." They embraced; and the husband killed her with a sword, and cut out the liver and began to cook it, when the child awoke and screamed. Neighbours and police came. In the police court, the peasant told his tale with childish frankness and cited stories from the Buddhist scriptures. The judges were moved to tears. They did not condemn the man to death;--they gave only nine years in prison. Really the man who ought to have been killed was the astrologer. And this but a few miles off from where they are teaching integral calculus, trigonometry, and Herbert Spencer!

yet Western science and religion could never inspire that idolatrous self-devotion to a mother which the old ignorant peasant and his wife had. She thought it her sacred duty to die for her mother-in-law....

I am going to have the delight of a visit from the author of "The Soul of the Far East." He is a lucky man,--wonderful genius, strength, youth, and plenty of money. He spends six months of each year in the Orient.