The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 18

I think that on the whole I am gaining a little in the path; but I have regular fits of despondency and disgust about my work, of course.

One day I think I have done well; the next that I am a hideous a.s.s and fool. Much is a question of nervous condition. But I feel sure that a long-continued period of self-contentment would be extremely injurious to me; and that checks and failures and mockeries are indispensable medicine.

I read the books you sent me--Mallock only because _you_ wished me to read it. I suppose it is the very best thing he ever did. How immensely clever and keen and--immoral! It is a wonderful thing.

"The Wood beyond the World" astounded me. Its value is in the study of the quaint English; but you know that such a thing could not be written in modern English prose very well; and I must say that I feel like disputing the _raison d'etre_ thereof. It is simply a very naughty story.

Kipling is priceless,--the single story of Purim Bagat is worth a kingdom; and the suggestive moral of human life is such a miracle! I can't tell you what pleasure it gave me. Indeed the three books--as representing three totally distinct fields of literary work--were a great treat.

My boy is quite well again, though we were very frightened about him.

He suffers from the cold every winter (you know the j.a.panese never have fire in winter), but he is getting hardier, I trust. He is very fond of pictures and says funny things about the pictures in the "Jungle Book."

I am off to the Southern Islands shortly,--so you may not hear from me for some weeks.

Ever affectionately, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

KOBE, January, 1895.

Since I wrote you last, you dear old fellow, I've been through some trouble. Indeed, the very _day_ after writing you, I broke down, and had to remain three weeks with compresses over my eyes in a dark room. I am now over it--able to write and read for a short time every day, but have been warned to leave routine newspaper work alone. Which I must do.

Your letter was--well, I don't just know what to call its quality:--there was a bracing tenderness in it that reminded me of a college friendship. Really, in this world there is nothing quite so holy as a college friendship. Two lads,--absolutely innocent of everything wrong in the world or in life,--living in ideals of duty and dreams of future miracles, and telling each other all their troubles, and bracing each other up. I had such a friend once. We were both about fifteen when separated, but had been together from ten. Our friendship began with a fight, of which I got the worst;--then my friend became for me a sort of ideal, which still lives. I should be almost afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other so): but your letter brought his voice and face back,--just as if his very ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder....

Kobe is a nice little place. The effect on me is not pleasant, however. I have become too accustomed to the interior. The sight of foreign women--the sound of their voices--jars upon me harshly after long living among purely natural women with soundless steps and softer speech. (I fear the foreign women here, too, are nearly all of the savagely _bourgeoise_ style--affected English and affected American ways prevail.) Carpets,--dirty shoes,--absurd fashions,--wickedly expensive living,--airs,--vanities,--gossip: how much sweeter the j.a.panese life on the soft mats,--with its ever dearer courtesy and pretty, pure simplicity. Yet my boy can never be a j.a.panese. Perhaps, if he grows old, there will some day come back to him memories of his mother's dainty little world,--the _hibachi_,--the _toko_,--the garden,--the lights of the household shrine,--the voices and hands that shaped his thought and guided every little tottering step. Then he will feel very, very lonesome,--and be sorry he did not follow after those who loved him into some shadowy resting-place where the Buddhas still smile under their moss....

Ever affectionately, LAFCADIO.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, January, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I'm able now to write and read a little every day--not much, as to reading: writing tires the eyes less. Glad you like "Glimpses," as I see by your last kind letter. Of course it is full of faults: any work written in absolute isolation must be. It's taking, though: the publishers announce a third edition already, and the notices have been good--in America, enthusiastic. _The Athenaeum_ praised it fervidly; but a few English papers abuse it. The mixture of blame and praise means literary success generally.

The earthquakes are really horrible. I can sympathize with you.

The sensation of foreign life here is very unpleasant, after life in the interior. A foreign interior is a horror to me; and the voices of the foreign women--China-Coast tall women--jar upon the comfort of existence. Can't agree with you about the "genuine men and women"

in the open ports. There are some--very, very few. (Thank the G.o.ds I shall never have to live among them!) The number of Germans here makes life more tolerable, I fancy. They are plain, but homely, which is a virtue, and liberal, which commercial English or Americans (the former especially) seldom are. They have their own club and a good library. But life in Yunotsu or Hino-misaki, or Oki, with only the bare means for j.a.panese comfort, were better and cleaner and higher in every way than the best open ports can offer.

The j.a.panese peasant is ten times more of a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever learn to be. Unfortunately the j.a.panese official, with all his civility and morality rubbed off, is something a good deal lower than a savage and meaner than the straight-out Western rough (who always has a kernel of good in him) by an inexpressible per cent. Carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--bra.s.s bands--churches! how I hate them!! And white shirts!--and _yof.u.ku!_ Would I had been born savage; the curse of civilized cities is on me--and I suppose I can't get away permanently from them. You like all these things, I know. I'm not expecting any sympathy--but thought you might like to know about the effect on me of a half-return to Western life. How much I could hate all that we call civilization I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have conceived without a long sojourn in old j.a.pan--the only civilized country that existed since antiquity. Them's my sentiments!

I have not yet been able to read Lowell's new book through. But he must have worked tremendously to write it. It is a very clever book--though disfigured by absolutely shameless puns. It touches truths to the quick,--with a light sharp sting peculiar to Lowell's art. It is painfully unsympathetic--Mephistophelian in a way that chills me. It is scientific--but the fault of it strikes me as being that the study is applicable equally to Europe or America as to j.a.pan. The same psychical phenomena may be studied out anywhere, with the same result. The race difference in persons, like the difference between life and not-life in biology, is only one of degree, not of kind. Still, it is a wonderful book.

Ever truly, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, January, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--To-day is a spring day and I can add a little to my screed. The weather brightens up my eyes.

I was thinking just now about the difference between the j.a.panese _hyakusho_ and the English merchant.

My servant girl from Imaichi--who cannot read or write--saw you at k.u.mamoto and said words to this effect: "He speaks j.a.panese like a great man. And he is so gentle and so kind." Vaguely something of the intellectual and moral side of you had reached and touched her simple mind. The other day a merchant said of you: "Chamberlain--Oh, yes. Met him at Miyanos.h.i.ta. Tell you, he's a gentleman--plays a good game of whist!" There 's appreciation for you. Which is the best soul of the two--my servant girl's or that merchant's?

A merchant, however, has inspired me with the idea of a sketch, to be ent.i.tled "His Josses"!...

On the other hand it strikes me that in another twenty years, or perhaps thirty, after a brief artificial expansion, all the ports will shrink.

The foreign commerce will be all reduced to agencies. A system of small persecutions will be inaugurated and maintained to drive away all the foreigners who can be driven away. After the war there will be a strong anti-foreign reaction--outrages--police-repressions--temporary stillness and peace: then a new crusade. Life will be made wretched for Occidentals--in business--just as it is being made in the schools--by all sorts of little tricky plans which cannot be brought under law-provisions, or even so defined as to appear to justify resentment--tricks at which the j.a.panese are as elaborately ingenious as they are in matters of etiquette and forms of other kinds. The nation will show its ugly side to us--after a manner unexpected, but irresistible.

The future looks worse than black. As for me, I am in a perpetual quandary. I suppose I'll have to travel West,--and console myself with the hope of visiting j.a.pan at long intervals.

Well, there's no use in worrying--one must face the music,

I am sorry your eyes are weak, too. What the devil of a trouble physical trouble is!--a dead weight check on will! Still, you have good luck in other ways, and after all, eye-trouble is only a warning in both our cases.

Ever truly, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, February, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I had mailed you the American letter before your own most kind enclosure came, with the note from Makino. Of course this is beyond thanks,--and I can't say very much about it. Since then I received from you also Lowell's six papers on Mars,--which I have read, and return by this mail,--and your friendly lines from Atami.

Just as you suggested in the Atami letter, I was feeling about matters.

There would be special conditions in New Orleans, on the paper of which I was ten years a staff-writer. I should have to work only a couple of hours a day in my own room, and would have opportunities of money-making and travel. There are risks, too,--yellow fever, lawlessness, and personal enemies. But to leave j.a.pan now would, of course, be like tearing one's self in two,--and I am not sure but the ultimate nervous result would destroy my capacity for literary work. The best thing, I imagine, will be to ask my friend to keep the gate open for me, in case I have to go. The great thing for me is not to worry: worry and literary work will not harmonize. The work always betrays the strain afterward.

You say my friend writes nicely. He is about the most lovable man I ever met,--an old-time Southerner, very tall and slight, with a singular face. He is so exactly an ideal Mephistopheles that he would never get his photograph taken. The face does not altogether belie the character,--but the mockery is very tender play, and queerly original.

It never offends. The real Mephistopheles appears only when there are ugly obstacles to overcome. Then the diabolical keenness with which motives are read and disclosed, and the lightning moves by which a plot is checkmated, or made a net for the plotter himself, usually startle people. He is a man of immense force--it takes such a one to rule in that community, but as a gentleman I never saw his superior in grace or consideration. I always loved him--but like all whom I like, never could get quite enough of his company for myself.

The papers on Mars are quite weirdly suggestive--are they not? Just how much of the theories and the discoveries were Lowell's very own, I can't make out--though the papers are things to be thankful for. You know the physiological side of his psychology in "Occult j.a.pan" is no more original than the "Miscellany" of a medical weekly.

By the way, I must point out a serious mistake he makes on page 293,--when he says that the absence of the belief in possession by other living men is a proof of the absence of personality in j.a.pan. As a matter of fact there is no such absence. I alone know of three different forms of such belief--and know that one is extremely common. So that all the metaphysical structure of argument built upon the supposed absence of that belief vanishes into nothingness!

As Huxley says, that man who goes about the world "unlabelled" is sure to be punished for it. So I can't help thinking that I ought to have a label. Fancy the man who makes his bear drink champagne seeking my company on the ground that "Neither of us are Christians." The Ama-terasu-Omi-kami business first aroused my suspicions, but the phrase itself was so raw!

Compania de uno 1 Compania de ninguno; Compania de dos 2 Compania de Dios; Compania de tres 3 Compania es (but never for me); Compania de cuatro 4 Compania del diablo.

This old Spanish hymn might have been made expressly about me,--except in No. 3. I should feel more at home with you if I knew you would share my letters with n.o.body. This is all for yourself only. Ever gratefully, with more than regards,

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, February, 1895.