The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 11

Professor Chamberlain, my other friend, spent a few days with me last week. He speaks j.a.panese better than the j.a.panese;--in fact, he is _Professor of j.a.panese in the Imperial University of j.a.pan_. He mentions me in his books; and Conder, who writes those beautiful books about j.a.panese flower arrangement and j.a.panese gardens, has just written a book with a kindly reference to me.

Enough to tire you, I fear, already. Well, _au revoir_, till the next mail. Affectionately ever,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO SENTARO NISHIDA

k.u.mAMOTO, April, 1893.

MY DEAR NISHIDA,--About the sentence that puzzles you (as it well might puzzle anybody unaccustomed to what we call "rant"),--the phrase simply signifies the Bible. It is based on the idea that Christ is the "_Light_ of the World" (Light and Glory being used synonymously); and the origin of this expression again goes back beyond Christianity into ancient Gnostic ideas,--_probably_ based on the Iranian belief of Ormuzd, the (Persian or Iranian) G.o.d of _Light_, as distinguished from Ahriman, the Spirit of Evil and Darkness. The common Christian people know nothing of this; but from childhood, they are accustomed to hear the word "Bible"

coupled with the words "light" and "glory" and "illumination,"--and to see pictures representing a Bible surrounded with rays of light beaming from it as from a sun. "The glory of the mechanic's shop," i.

e., illuminating the darkness of labour, the suffering and gloom, by light of consolation, etc.--But I must say that all this is what we call "rant" (worse than "cant");--it is of no earthly use to let the boys read it. I used always to skip it. The article is not even good English: it is fanatical "gush" and humbug. If I were you, I would not bother with it at all,--except for your own amus.e.m.e.nt, as a study of queer ideas. I don't mean to say _all_ writing of this sort is bad;--some of it is very beautiful, although the ideas be false. But that stuff in Sanders's Reader is the sort we call "_cheap_ rant,"--such as any uneducated Sunday-school teacher can spout by the mile....

I do not think Setsu can travel again this year. I expect to become a father about September, or perhaps even sooner. So we shall not see Tokyo in 1893, at all events. And the chances are that I shall not be able to travel very far;--as I shall have to be in constant weekly communication with the mail-steamers for America. The preparation of the printed proofs will be hard work.

I am sorry about Goto. You summed him up, however, very keenly a long time ago.--We have a wonderful drawing-master here, who painted a wonderful oil-portrait of Mr. Akizuki. And that man is only getting $12 a month (counting the deduction of his salary for building warships)!

Yet he is really a fine artist.

Besides the letter of introduction I gave you to Mr. Kano, I also wrote him a long letter about you last year. Should you go to Tokyo, therefore, remind him of that. Or, if you wish, I will write you at once a third letter to take with you. You will like Mr. Kano at sight. He charms even the most reserved foreigners, and still he is perfectly easy and simple in his manners. Faithfully yours,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, April, 1893.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... I hear rarely from America, and have no definite news from Boston up to date. They send me a paper--the Sunday edition, full of poetry about love, woodcuts of beauties of fashion, and all sorts of chatter about women and new styles of undergarments. To-day, after three years in the most Eastern East, when I look at that paper, I can hardly believe my eyes. The East has opened my eyes. How affected the whole thing seems! Yet it never seemed so to me before. My students say to me, "Dear Teacher, why are your English novels all filled with nonsense about love and women?--we do not like such things." Then I tell them partly why. "You must know, my dear young gentlemen, that in England and America, marriage is a most important matter,--though it is something you never even speak about in j.a.pan. For in j.a.pan, it is as easy to get married as it is to eat a bowl of rice. But for educated young men in the West, it is very difficult and dangerous to marry. It is necessary to be rich to marry well,--or to be, at least, what _you_ would call rich. And the struggle for life is very bitter and very terrible--so bitter and terrible that you cannot possibly imagine what it means. It is hard to live at all,--made harder to marry. Therefore the whole object of life is to succeed _in order to get married_. And the parents have nothing to do with the matter, as in j.a.pan; the young man must please the girl, and must win her away from all other young men who want to get her. That is why the English and others write all that stuff about love and beauty and marriage, and why everybody buys those books and laughs or weeps over them--though to you they are simply disgusting."

But that was not all the truth. The whole truth is always suggested to me by the Sunday paper. We live in the musky atmosphere of desire in the West;--an erotic perfume emanates from all that artificial life of ours;--we keep the senses perpetually stimulated with a million ideas of the eternal feminine; and our very language reflects the strain. The Western civilization is using all its arts, its sciences, its philosophy in stimulating and exaggerating and exacerbating the thought of s.e.x. An Oriental would almost faint with astonishment and shame to see a Western ballet. He would scream at the sight of a French nude. He would be scandalized by a Greek statue. He would rightly and instantly estimate all this as being exactly what it is,--artificial stimulus of dangerous senses. The whole West is steeped in it. It now seems, even to me, almost disgusting.

Yet what does it mean? Certainly it pollutes literature, creates and fosters a hundred vices, accentuates the misery of those devoted by the law of life as the victims of l.u.s.t. It turns art from Nature to s.e.x.

It cultivates one aesthetic faculty at the expense of all the rest. And yet--perhaps its working is divine behind all that veil of vulgarity and l.u.s.tfulness. It is cultivating also, beyond any question, a capacity for tenderness the Orient knows nothing of. Tenderness is not of the Orient _man_. He is without brutality, but he is also without that immense reserve force of deep love and forgiving-power which even the rougher men of the West have. The Oriental is intellectually, rationally capable of all self-sacrifice and loyalty: he does the n.o.blest and grandest things without even the ghost of a tender feeling. His feeblest pa.s.sion is that of s.e.x, because with him the natural need has never been starved or exasperated. He marries at sixteen or seventeen perhaps,--is a father of two or three children at twenty. All that sort of thing for him belongs to the natural appet.i.tes: he would no more talk about his wife or tell you he had a child born, than he would tell you that his organs performed their function regularly at 6.30 A.M. He is ashamed of appearing to have any s.e.xual love at all in public;--and his family live all their lives in the shadow--do not appear to visitors. Well, his nature may lose something by this. It loses certainly in capacities that mean everything for us--tenderness, deep sympathy, a world of sensations not indeed s.e.xual with us, yet surely developed out of s.e.xualism to no small extent,--just as the sense of moral beauty developed out of the sense of physical beauty.

I guess this must bore you, however. More anon of other matters.

Ever faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, June, 1893.

DEAR HENDRICK,--I am not quite sure that you are right about the Oriental view of things. It is very difficult to understand at first.

It is not want of refinement or sensibility to beautiful things. It is rather a tendency to silence and secrecy in regard to the highest emotions. So that a cultivated j.a.panese never even speaks of his wife and family, or hints of his fondness for them. Of course, our idea is n.o.bler and higher. But it is a question with me whether it cannot be, and has not been, developed to excess. I think we have filled the whole universe with an ideal of woman. Star-swarms and all cosmical glories exist for us only in an infinity of pa.s.sional pantheism. I suspect that we see Nature especially through the beauty of woman. A splendid tree, a fragrant bud, delicacy of petals, songs of birds, undulations of hills, mobility of waters, sounds of foliage, murmur of breezes and their caress, laughter of streamlets, even the gold light--do not all these things remind us of woman? You might cite the ruggedness of oaks and the grimness of crags as masculine. True, we have visions of Nature as masculine--for rugged and mighty contrasts. But how enormously preponderant is the eternal feminine! Even our language is a language of gender,--in which I think the feminine predominates. But in our thought the masculine at once suggests the feminine, and creates a new idea. All precious things, too, remind us of what is not masculine, because "far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of _her_."

Now the Oriental sees Nature in no such way. His language has no gender.

He does not think of a young girl when he sees a palm, nor of the lines of a beautiful body when he sees the undulations of the hills.

Neither does he see Nature as masculine. He sees it as _neuter_. His geographical nomenclature shows this. He sees things as they are. The immediate inference would be that he finds less enjoyment in them. But his art shows that he finds _more_. He sees in Nature much that we can't see at all. He sees beauty in stones,--in common stones,--in clouds, fogs, smoke, curling water, shapes of trees, shapes of insects. In my friend's alcove is a stone. When you can learn that that stone is more beautiful than a beautiful painting, you can begin to understand that there is another way of seeing Nature. In my own garden there are a number of large stones. Their value is seven hundred dollars.

No American would give five cents for them--no! he would not dream of taking them as a gift--no! he would consider himself highly insulted by the offer! Then why are they worth seven hundred dollars? Because they are beautiful. You would say: "I can't see it!" You can't see it because you see all Nature through the idea of woman. And it is just faintly possible (I don't say certain) that our way--your way of seeing Nature is all wrong. It is like peeping through an atmosphere which makes everything iridescent and deflects the lines of forms.

Now, why do I suspect that our way of looking at Nature may not be the highest,--besides the plain fact that it is not according to the Eternal order of things? I suspect it because the evolution of the ideal has been chiefly physical. It has not been an ideal of soul. Is the soul of a woman more beautiful than that of a man--outside of maternal tenderness? You have just had a divine glimpse of two souls--excuse the personal question (for it is a highly important one): which seemed to you the largest and deepest?--in which were the glories more profound and radiant? And is it not essential that the woman-beauty of soul must be the lesser; for its scope must be limited by its eternal duty. We are in the presence, however, of the undeniable fact that we rarely get glimpses of the higher possibilities of the man-soul. Life is too hard and bitter. But in the twilight of every home one sees the woman-souls glowing like fireflies. We think only of the lights we see. The circling darknesses are opaque to us,--like burnt-out suns.

Reading over the list of things in your notebook I was impressed by several facts. It is well to set down everything that impresses you.

But--I cannot help thinking that you do not look for the highest,--that you miss a universe of beautiful things. The obtrusive, the eccentric, the sharply bitter, the "Distorted Souls" as you call them, naturally compel attention first,--just as in real life the forward, the selfish, the aggressive, force themselves upon us. It is of the highest possible value, as a means of self-preservation, to understand them. But I suspect that it is of no value at all to draw them, to photograph them, to give them artistic treatment _except in a contrast-study_. They are not beautiful. They are not good. They are, using the word in the Miltonic sense, obscene--like owls. On the other hand the beautiful in life must be sought, and coaxed, and caressed to make it show its colours. It does not appear very often spontaneously. Yet I feel convinced it is all about us. It travels on railroads too, and lodges at hotels. It fights for life against ugliness and wickedness and apathy and selfishness: it is Ormuzd against Ahriman. Now what is the artist's moral duty? (Of course he may take any subject he pleases and be great in it.) But what is his duty in the eternal order of things, to art and to ethics? Is it not to extract the gold from the ore,--the rubies and emeralds from the rubble? I think it is--though many may laugh at me.

Thus newer and higher ideals are created. We advance only by new ideals.

I don't mean to say we should make statues of pure gold, or a table, like that of some Caliph, out of a single emerald. But I think that in modern life we should use the dross and slag only when their lightness, worthlessness, or rudeness brings out in higher relief the light of the pure jewel, the weight of the pure metal, the value of that which gives the radiance or the gravity. And in the order of research I would seek the lodes and veins first;--the rest is always easy to find and handle, though requiring much scientific skill, of course, to use artistically.

There _is_ a world, I suppose, almost as barren as the Alkali Plains, where convention has strangled all feeling, and where the development of selfish capacities has choked the other growths. But either below this world or above it there are Americas to discover--full of warmth, light, and beauty--continents chained to each other by snow-peaks, watered by Amazons and Mississippis.

Below, I think, more than above,--for the nearer to Nature, the nearer to truth. And the value, artistically, of our high-pressure civilization seems to me to be that its monstrosities and glooms and tragedies infernal give an opportunity for the grandest contrasts ever made. What I would pray you to do is "to put a lily in the mouth of h.e.l.l"--using one of Carlyle's phrases. Then the petals of the lily will change into pure light, like those of the Lotus of Amida Buddha....

Good-bye, with affectionate wishes,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, July, 1893.

DEAR HENDRICK,--To continue from my last:--

It seems to me you might have mistaken my meaning in my half-criticism of the contents of your notebook. I don't wish you should think I find any fault with them _per se_. Indeed you cannot set down too much. Only I think you have been collecting only shadow-and-fire material. You have no sky-blues,--no rose and violet and purple and gold-yellow,--no cadmium, no iridescences. You have that which will give them all value--artistic value. Even if you have only one light for ten darknesses, it will be enough to illume them all.

And now for Ego and Egotisms. In my home the women are all making baby-clothes,--funny little j.a.panese baby-clothes. All the tender Buddhist divinities, who love little children, have been invoked except one,--he who cares for them only when they are dead, and plays little ghostly games with them in the shadowy world. Letters of congratulation come from all directions, and queer, pretty presents; for the announcement of pregnancy is a subject of great gladness in j.a.pan. And one theme of rejoicing is that the child will look more like a j.a.panese than the children of other foreigners, because the father is dark.

Behind all this, of course, there is a universe of new sensations,--new ideas,--revelations of things in Buddhist faith and in the religion of the more ancient G.o.ds, which are very beautiful and touching. About the world an atmosphere of delicious, sacred navete,--difficult to describe, because resembling nothing in the Western world.--Some doubts and fears for me, of course; but they are pa.s.sing away gradually. I have only some anxiety about _her_: still she is so strong that I trust the G.o.ds will be kind to us....

This summer I shall not be able to travel far. First, of course, I can't leave my little woman too long alone; second, I have proofs to correct; third, I am economizing. We have now nearly $3500 between us; and I want to try to provide for her as soon as I can,--so that once the chances of ill luck are off my mind, I can make a few long voyages to other places east of j.a.pan. The Chinese ports are only a few days distant; and there is Manila, there is the French Orient to see. I hope to be able to do this in a few years more. You will be glad to hear I am very strong, though getting grey,--much stronger than I was at thirty.

Professor Chamberlain and I have a secret project in hand,--a book on j.a.panese folk-lore. Whether we can carry it out I do not know; but if the dear Professor's health keeps up we shall do something together....

Ever faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO SENTARO NISHIDA

k.u.mAMOTO, August, 1893.

DEAR NISHIDA,--I got your kind letter,--and the money,--and the ballads; for all of which a thousand thanks. I feel you have been very, very kind in all this, even while you were sick: so that my poor thanks signify little of what I really feel towards you. It has given me much pleasure to hear of your being better; but I am disappointed at your being unable to travel,--very much disappointed, as I fear I will not be able to leave k.u.mamoto again this vacation....

I see that, as regards Kyushu compared with Tokyo, you take the moral aspect of the question, while I have possibly been ruled too much by the artistic side. I cannot fully understand the moral side, of course: I can only perceive that the Kyushu students are allowed to dress as simply as possible,--are encouraged to be frugal and frank, and rough in their sports,--and are generally said to be extremely independent and what you call _katai_, isn't it? But whether they are really any better than Matsue students, I don't know. Certainly they have no pleasures to soften their minds. There is nothing to see, and nowhere to go. And Kyoto is the most delightful city in the whole of j.a.pan. However, I suppose it has also temptations for students of a dangerous sort....

I had no luck with k.u.magae Masayoshi, and was obliged to send the boy back to Oki, after he had worried and made unhappy everybody in the house. He was an extraordinarily clever boy,--both at school, and at everything he undertook,--extremely skilful with his hands, and almost diabolically intelligent. But he had no affection at all, and seemed to be naturally very cruel and cunning. He was strictly honest, and trustworthy,--for all that. But his character was supremely selfish and malignant. He made nasty songs about people, and sang them, and gave us the impression of being a small devil.

I am trying to do some literary work. Your ballad of Shuntoku-maru proved quite useful to me in the course of an essay I wrote on the difficulty experienced by j.a.panese in understanding a certain cla.s.s of English poetry and fiction. It revealed a popular conception of things,--that ballad, which I took for an ill.u.s.tration, in showing the total unlikeness of Western to Oriental society--especially in the family relation; the absence of flirting and kissing and woman-worship which we have in the West. Indeed I think the great difficulty of mutual comprehension between the j.a.panese and the English is chiefly due to the predominance of _a feminine idea_ in our language, our art, and our whole conception of Nature. Therefore the Oriental can see aspects of Nature to which we remain blind....

LAFCADIO HEARN.