The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 15

Of course in so corrupt a country as America the pecuniary side of the question is attended with some ugly stealing; but that is done before the money is placed in the hands of the directors, and is done at a serious risk. In some American States, too, the text-books are meddled with by politicians. But I think it might be quite possible in j.a.pan to adopt a system of school-support, which, while removing the schools from the power of the Kencho to meddle with them, would also establish something like permanency in their management and method. At present everything is so unpermanent and unsteady that one feels the tendency is to dissolution rather than integration.

Ever very truly yours, LAFCADIO HEARN.

P. S. I forgot your question about the summer vacation. I have not yet been able to decide exactly what to do, but it is at least certain that I go to Tokyo, and that I hope to meet you there. Should anything prevent you from going, I may try to meet you elsewhere. I should like to see you, and hear some more of the same wonderful things you used to tell me,--which you will read in that much-delayed book. By the way, I did not tell you that the publishers concluded to delay it again, on account of what they call the trade-season. I suppose they are right, but it is very provoking. Including the index the book makes about 700 pages, in two volumes. Meantime I have half written a philosophical book about j.a.panese life.

Ever faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, Spring, 1894.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... Are you reading the _Atlantic_ at all? There is a wonderful story by Mrs. Deland, "Philip and his Wife." Philip's wife makes me think always of E. B.

The problem of merely being able to live. What a plague it is! And the pain of life isn't hunger, isn't want, isn't cold, isn't sickness, isn't physical misery of any kind: it is simply moral pain caused by the d.a.m.nable meanness of those who try to injure others for their own personal benefit or interest. That is really all the pain of the struggle of life.

Ever faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, May, 1894.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply telling her, "I don't know."

It now seems to me that I was partly wrong in a former letter to you about business morality: I took much too narrow a view of the case, perhaps. The comparison between the Western and Oriental brain--which everybody is forced to make after a few years' sojourn here--now appears to me appalling in its results. The Western business man is really a very terrible and wonderful person. He is the outcome, perhaps, of a mediaeval wish. For types are created by men's wishes--just as men themselves are created. The greatest teaching of science is that no Body made us,--but we made ourselves under the smart stimulus of pain.

Well, as I was saying, the business man is an answer to a wish. (You know about the frogs who asked Jupiter for a King.) In the age of robber-barons, racks, swordmills, and _droit de cuissage_,--men prayed Jupiter for Law, Order, System. Jupiter (in the shape of a very, very earnest desire) produced the Business man. He represents insatiate thirst of dominion, supreme intellectual aggressive capacity, faultless practical perceptivity, and the art of handling men exactly like p.a.w.ns.

But he represents also Order, System, Law. He is Organization, and is King of the Earth. The p.a.w.ns cry out, "We are not p.a.w.ns." But he always politely answers, "I am sorry to disagree with you, but I find it expedient for our mutual interest to consider you p.a.w.ns; besides, I have no time to argue the matter. If you think you are not p.a.w.ns, you must show the faculty of Organization."

The tyranny of the future must be that of Organization: the monopoly, the trust, the combination, the a.s.sociated company--representing supremely perfect mathematical unification of Law, Order, and System.

Much more powerful than the robber-baron, or Charlemagne, or Barbarossa, these are infinitely less human,--having no souls, etc. (What would be the use of souls!--souls only waste time.) Business is exact and dangerous and powerful like a colossal dynamo: it is the extreme of everything men used to pray for,--and it is _not_ what they did _not_ pray for. Perhaps they would like the robber-baron better.

We little petty outsiders--the gnats hovering about life--feel the world is changing too quickly: all becoming methodical as an abacus. There isn't any more room for us. Compet.i.tion is of no use. Law, Order, and System fill the places without consulting us,--the editorial desks, the clerkships, the Government posts, the publishers' offices, the pulpits, the professorships, the sinecures as well as the tough jobs. Where a worker is unnecessary, a p.a.w.n is preferred. (Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness!--provided with a good table and a regular supply of reading from Murray's circulating library!) One thing is dead sure: in another generation there can be no living by dreaming and scheming of art: only those having wealth can indulge in the luxury of writing books for their own pleasure....

Faithfully ever, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, May, 1894.

DEAR HENDRICK,--So far from your letters not being interesting, they are always full of interest--first, simply because they are _your_ letters; secondly, because they tell the evolution of you--showing how, after all, we are made by the eternal forces. That you become a business man, in every sense of the word, is inevitable. It would be wrong if you did not. It would be wrong not to love your profession. The evil of becoming a business man exists only for small men--dries small men up. Surely you are not small! There is nothing to regret--except perhaps a temporary darkness which may yield to enormous light later on.

Some would say to you, "Always keep one little place in your heart from hardening." I would say nothing of the kind now: I think you are too large to be talked to in that way.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Suppose I try to ill.u.s.trate by reference to the scope of human thinking in general. Ethical theology might be represented then as an inverted pyramid,--thus [Ill.u.s.tration: inverted triangle]; hard, skeptical science by a larger figure, pressing it down; the highest philosophy by a circle,--something like this figure. The largest thought accepts all, surrounds all, absorbs all,--like light itself. The ugly and the beautiful, the ignorant and the wise, the virtuous and the vile,--all come within its recognition; nature and sins as well as societies and clubs,--prisons and churches, brothels and houses. The very duties of observation forced upon you compel two things: the study of all moral and material details; the study of all combinations and wholes. And the larger the grasp of the whole the larger must become your power and value; for you will have to see eternal laws working down out of the unknown and thereafter ramifying and inter-ramifying into innumerable actions, reactions, disintegrations, and crystallizations. The horrible thing about business, men say, is that it considers men as p.a.w.ns. But if your sight becomes large enough,--if your thought widens enough,--you _must_ look upon men as p.a.w.ns. To be a brother to all you cannot. To be a friend to many you cannot. You become the agent--not of the Commercial Union a.s.surance Co. only,--but the special agent of infinite laws; and if you act efficiently in that capacity, you cannot do very wrong. The Cosmos will be responsible for you.

The business man to-day is the king of the earth; merchants and bankers are the rulers, and will for all time be, while industrialism continues necessary. They seek and win power, and all the good things of life; they also prevent others from getting either. They may not be poets, philosophers, didactic teachers, artists; but their mental organization is undoubtedly the highest,--because its achievements represent the mastery of the highest difficulties, the deepest problems, the most intricate riddles. Certainly this higher organization is obtained at a heavy cost in the majority of cases. The emotions dry up in the evolution of it, and the moral sense weakens. But because this must happen in the majority of cases when any _new_ faculty is being developed, it is far from happening in all. The man whose vision is vast enough can scarcely do more evil than a G.o.d. He cannot injure his world voluntarily without suffering from his own action. He must study his world as a naturalist his ant-hill. And even as a G.o.d he must feel the ultimate evil and good is not of him; but is being forever viewlessly woven in Shadow by the Fates of the Infinite,--whose distaff twists the thread of his own life, and whose will guides his own courses.

The great desire would be for the combination of emotion with knowledge, of philosophy with mathematics, of Plato with a Napoleon, or Spinoza with a Gould. This will come. Now it is very rare....

You might reply, "In the present order of things the combination would ruin the working-power of the man. The Gould could not act the Gould if combined with the Spinoza,--nor could the Napoleon _se foule de la vie d'un million d'hommes_ if crossed with a Plato."

I would answer, "Not in the elder generation, but why not to-day? If the moral laws that in a Spinoza would have checked a Gould, or in a Plato checked a Napoleon, were essentially limited in other years, are they so to-day? If the two philosophers had had larger horizons of thinking, would they have recognized a tether,--or would they not rather have viewed themselves as mere force-atoms in an infinite electric stream? Are there not now recognitions of laws transcending all human ethics?--laws of which Goethe threw out such weird suggestions?--and must not business, from its very nature, drift into the knowledge of these laws?"

To-day, it is true, the highest possible type of business man would have to follow the small policy of the majority. But certainly he can be like one of those compound double-engines,--whereof the best half is kept idle in reserve,--always oiled and speckless and ready for rare emergencies or opportunities. If something within you regrets something else that is pa.s.sing away, that need not be any alarming sign. The mere fact that the regret exists, indicates higher possibilities. Don't you remember Emerson's extraordinary lines,--

"Though thou love her as thyself-- As a self of purer clay,-- Though her parting dim the day Stealing grace from all alive,-- _Heartily know, When half-G.o.ds go The G.o.ds arrive!_"

The dear little psyche is going? Well, let her go! Regret her a little--that is sweet and good. Feel lonesome for her awhile. Wait. Then make yourself a new soul, large enough to wrap round the whole world, like the aether.

Faithfully ever, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO PAGE M. BAKER

k.u.mAMOTO, 1894.

DEAR PAGE,--Though I never hear from you directly, the _T.-D._ brings me occasionally very emphatic proof that I am not forgotten, and am perhaps forgiven. So I venture a line or two, hoping you will not show the letter to anybody.

I told you some years ago I was married; but I did not tell you I had a son,--who is, of course, dearer than my own life to me. Curiously, he is neither like his mother nor like me: he takes after some English ancestor,--for he is grey-eyed, fair-haired (curly chestnut), and wonderfully strong: he is going, if he lives, to be a remarkably powerful man; and, I hope, a more sensible man than his foolish dad.

Well, now two perils menace me. First, the immense reaction of j.a.pan,--rea.s.serting her individuality against all foreign influence, which has resulted in the discharge of most of the high-paid foreign employees; secondly, the war with China. The j.a.panese--essentially a fighting race, as Bantams are--will probably win the battles every time; but if China be in dead, bitter earnest, _she_ will win the war. (Probably her chances will be s.n.a.t.c.hed from her by foreign intervention.) But whatever be the end of this enormous complication, j.a.pan is going to empty her treasury. The chances for Government employees are dwindling: my contract runs only till March, and the chances are 0.

Of course, I can peg along somehow,--getting odd jobs from newspapers, etc., doing a little teaching of English, French, or Spanish. I can't help thinking I would do better to go abroad--especially at a time when every American 100 cents is worth nearly 200 j.a.panese cents.

Here goes. Could you get me anything to do if I started in the spring for America? I mean something good enough to save money at. I am past all nonsense now, and for myself only would need very little. But it would not be for myself that I should go. I should want to be sure of being able to send money to j.a.pan, by confining my own wants to good living and an occasional book or two. If you could get me something anywhere south of Mason and Dixon's line, I should try to be practically grateful in some way. I am not in the least desirous of seeing Boston or New York or Philadelphia--or being obliged to exist by machinery.

I would rather infinitely be in Memphis or Charleston or Mobile or--glorious Florida.

Or can you get me anything educational in Spanish-America? I could scarcely take my people to the U.S.,--but to South America I might try later on. I am now 44, and all grey as a badger. Unless I can make enough to educate my boy well, I don't know what I am worth,--but I feel that I shall have precious little time to do it in. Add 20 to 44,--and how much is left of a man?

Perhaps you will think--if I am worth thinking about at all: "Well, why were you such a d----d fool as to go and have a son?" Ask the G.o.ds!

Really _I_ don't know.

Ever faithfully--or, as the j.a.panese would say, _un_faithfully,--yours,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

k.u.mAMOTO, June, 1894.

DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... We were chatting last time about the morality of business. Now let me tell you how the question strikes an intelligent j.a.panese student.

"Sir, what was your opinion when you first came to our country about the old-fashioned j.a.panese? Please be frank with me."

"You mean the old men, who still preserve the old customs and courtesy,--men like Mr. Akizuki, the Chinese teacher?"