The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume II Part 20

KOBE, March, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--About three days ago came the welcome books.

"The Cruise of the Marchesa" it would be difficult to praise too highly. There are a few touches here and there slightly priggish, or sn.o.bbish,--but the fine taste of the writer as a rule, his modesty as a man of science, his compact force of expression, his appreciation of nature, his astonishing capacity for saying a vast deal in a few words, are indubitable, and give the book a very high literary place. The engravings are lovely. The other book is an amazement. How any man could seriously make such a book I can't possibly imagine. It is the most disgraceful attempt of the sort I ever saw,--absolutely unreadable as a whole: an almanac is a romance by comparison. Still I found a lot of interesting facts by groping through it. I should scarcely like to trust myself in Manila.

The Marchesa book is a delight, and will bear many readings. The general impression is that both Sulu and the Celebes are paradises; but that Dutch order is highly preferable to the condition of the isles under Spanish domination (in theory). The necessity of dress-coats and _de rigueur_ habits is the chief drawback, I should imagine, at a place like Maca.s.sar. But the Malayan Dutch colonies must be delightful places. I fear, however, that as in Java, the Christianization of the natives has spoiled the field for folk-lore work.

The Ryukyu chapters, with the illumination of your own pamphlet, make a very pleasant, dreamy, gentle sensation. Half-China and half-j.a.pan under tropical conditions should create a particular queerness quite different from our Dai Nippon queerness. I hardly believe that the conditions will change so rapidly as those of j.a.pan proper. In such lat.i.tudes and such isolation changes do not come quickly. There are little places on the west coast I know of where the conditions must be still pretty near the same as they were a thousand years ago.

I fear, however, my travelling days (except for business and monotonous work) are nearly over. I'm not going to get rich. Some day I may hit the public; but that will probably be when I shall have become ancient. I feel just now empty and useless and a dead failure. Perhaps I shall feel better next season. At all events I have learned that, beyond all doubt and question, it is absolutely useless for me to try to "force work."

If the feeling does not come of itself from outside, one had better do nothing.

I had a sensation the other day, though, which I want to talk to you about. I felt as if I hated j.a.pan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came two women to the house, to sell ballads. One took her _samisen_ and sang; and people crowded into the tiny yard to hear. Never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty, all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that voice; and the old first love of j.a.pan and of things j.a.panese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting. I looked at the people, and I saw they were nearly all weeping, and snuffing; and though I could not understand the words, I could feel the pathos and the beauty of things. Then, too, for the first time, I noticed that the singer was blind. Both women were almost surprisingly ugly, but the voice of the one that sang was indescribably beautiful; and she sang as peasants and birds and _semi_ sing, which is nature and is divine. They were wanderers both. I called them in, and treated them well, and heard their story. It was not romantic at all,--small-pox, blindness, a sick husband (paralyzed) and children to care for. I got two copies of the ballad, and enclose one. I should be very glad to pay for having it translated literally:--if you think it could be used, I wish you would some day, when opportunity offers, give it to a j.a.panese translator. As for price, I should say five yen would be a fair limit.

Would you not like me to return some day your version of the k.u.mamoto Rojo, and admirable translation? I preserve it carefully; and have used some of the lines for a sketch in the forthcoming book. I rendered nearly the whole into loose verse, but in spite of my utmost efforts, I could do nothing with the best part of it; I could put no spirit into the lines. My suggestion about it is because it is a very curious if not a very poetical thing; and should you ever make an essay upon modern j.a.panese military songs, it would be a pity not to include it. So it is always carefully kept, not only for its own sake, but also in view of such possible use.

I find it is still the custom when a _shinju_ occurs to make a ballad about it, and sing the same, and sell it. This reminds one of London.

Ballad customs seem to be the same in all parts of the world.

I shall soon return the books, with a copy of the next _Atlantic_. What could I send you that you would like? I should suggest Rossetti, if you do not know him well--for I think he ranks as high as Tennyson. I have only Wallace among travellers. I have all of Fiske and Huxley and Spencer and Clifford and the philosophy of Lewes. By the way, have you read "Trilby"? I have read it several times over. It is a wonderful book. The art of it escapes one at first reading, when one reads only for the story.

LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I warned you not to get Gautier's complete works--so you have been disappointed against my desire. Gautier's own opinion was adverse to the publication of his complete poems in this shape.

He selected and published separately those which satisfied him, in the "Emaux et Camees." (I once translated "Les Taches Jaunes,"--isn't it?--in the other volume; a bit of weird sensualism quite in the Romantic spirit.) Gautier's work is often uneven. He was a journalist, and lived by the newspaper. His life's complaint was that he could never find time for perfect work: the effort merely to live finally worried him to death during the siege, I think. Still, writing merely for a newspaper,--in haste,--without a chance to think and polish,--his feuilletons remain treasures of French literature. (You are very unjust to his prose; for it is the finest of all French prose.) His complete works are worth having--they run to about 60 vols., but they cannot all be had from one publisher. So he has become a subject for book-collectors. Sainte-Beuve, like Gautier, existed as a journalist. In France a journalist used to have literary chances. In English-speaking countries literary work is still outside of the newspapers; and our would-be litterateurs have therefore a still harder struggle. (See that article in the _Revue_. No English prose could accomplish those feats of colour and sensation--delicate sensation the most difficult to produce.

English as an artistic tongue is immeasurably inferior to French.)

"Philip and His Wife" was finished in the October number. I know I sent all the numbers containing it. Mrs. Deland is a great genius, I think.

Her "Story of a Child" was one of the daintiest bits of psychology I ever read.

Sorry you deny hereditary sensation. The idea of the experimentalists that the mind of the newly born child is a _tabula rasa_, and that all sensations are based on individual experiences, is no longer recognized--not at least by the evolutional school of psychology, the only purely scientific school. Spencer especially has denied this idea.

In the life about us we see every day proofs of inherited capacity for pleasures we know nothing of, and incapacity for pleasures normal to us and to our whole race. Indeed, I can prove the fact to you at any time....

Faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

P. S. I have been out for a walk. As usual the little boys cried "Ijin,"

"Tojin,"--and, although I don't go out alone, the changed feeling of even the adult population toward a foreigner wandering through their streets was strongly visible.

A sadness, such as I never felt before in j.a.pan, came over me. Perhaps your pencilled comments on the decrease of filial piety, and the erroneous impressions of national character in "Glimpses," had something to do with it. I felt, as never before, how utterly dead Old j.a.pan is, and how ugly New j.a.pan is becoming. I thought how useless to write about things which have ceased to exist. Only on reaching a little shrine, filled with popular _ex-voto_,--innocent foolish things,--it seemed to me something of the old heart was beating still,--but far away from me, and out of reach. And I thought I would like to be in the old Buddhist cemetery at Gesshoji, which is in Matsue, in the Land of Izumo,--the dead are so much better off than the living, and were so much greater.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, March, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine; but I must confess that your letter on "shall" and "will" is a sort of revelation in one sense--it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the sight and sound of the words "will" and "shall." I confess, also, that I never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of "will" as softer and gentler than "shall." The word "shall" in the second person especially has for me a queer identification with English harshness and menace,--memories of school, perhaps. I shall study the differences by your teaching, and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything--the word nothing. For example, the Western cowboy says "Yes, you will, Mister," in a tone that means something much more terrible than the angry educated Englishman's "you shall." I know this confession is horrid--but there's the truth of the matter; and I feel angry with conventional forms of language of which I cannot understand the real spirit. I trust the tendency to subst.i.tute "will" for "shall" which you have noticed, and which I have always felt, is going eventually to render the use of "shall" with the first person obsolete. I am "colour blind" to the values you a.s.sert; and I suspect that the majority of the English-speaking races--the raw people--are also blind thereunto. It is the people, after all, who make the language in the end, and in the direction of least resistance.

You did not quite catch my meaning on the subject of inherited feeling.

I did not hint you denied heredity (though your last letter embodies several strong denials of it, I think). I believe it is an accepted general rule, for example, that only a child having parents of different races can learn even two languages equally well: in other cases, one language gains at the expense of the other. Creoles exemplify this rule. Toys are related to the aesthetic faculty, to the play-impulse, to the imaginative capacity. These differ really in different races; and represent, not individual education at all, but the sum of racial experiences under certain conditions. I cannot believe for a moment that an English child born in j.a.pan could feel the same sensation on looking at a j.a.panese picture as the sensation felt by a j.a.panese child when looking at the same picture. (With food, the matter is different: English children in many cases disliking greasy cooking, and in other cases showing a decided preference for fat. Only a very large number of instances--many thousand--could really show any general rule in the case of English children born in j.a.pan. The evidence you cite seems to me a contradiction, or exception to general tendencies.) The psychical fact about feelings and emotions is that they are inheritances, just as much as the colour of hair, or the size of limbs; and tastes--such as a taste for music or painting--are similarly inherited. They are outside of the individual experience as much as a birthmark. To explain fully why, would involve a lot of neurological scribbling,--but it is sufficient to say that as all feelings are the result of motions in nervous structure, the volume and character and kind of feeling is predetermined in each individual by the character of nerve-tissue and its arrangement and complexity. In no two individuals are the nervous structures exactly the same; and the differences in races or individuals are consequent upon the differences in quality, variety, and volume of ancestral experience shaping each life.

"The experience-hypothesis," says Spencer, "is inadequate to account for emotional phenomena. It is even more at fault in respect to the emotions than in respect to the cognitions. The doctrine that all the desires, all the sentiments, are generated by the experiences of the individual, is so glaringly at variance with facts that I wonder how any one should ever have entertained it." And he cites "the multiform pa.s.sions of the infant, displayed before there has been any such amount of experience as could possibly account for them."

In short, there is no possible room for argument as to whether each particular character--with all its possibilities, intellectual or emotional--is not predetermined by the character of nervous structure, slowly evolved by millions of billions of experiences in the past. As the differences in the ancestral sums of experiences, so the differences in the psychical life. Varying enormously in races so widely removed as English and j.a.panese, it is impossible to believe that any feeling in one race is exactly parallelled by any feeling in the other. It is equally impossible to think that the feelings of a j.a.panese child can be the same as those of an English child born in j.a.pan. Amazing physical proof to the contrary would be afforded by a comparative study of the two nervous structures.

To say, therefore, that the sight of a toy--adjusted exactly by the experience of the race to the experience of the individual--produces on the mind of a j.a.panese child the same impression it would produce on the mind of an English child born in j.a.pan and brought up by j.a.panese only, would be to deny all our modern knowledge of biology, psychology, and even physiology. The pleasure of the j.a.panese child in its toy is the pleasure of the dead.

Ever faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, April, 1895.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--"The law of heredity is unlimited in its application"

(Spencer, "Biology," vol. I, chapter "Heredity"). "Some naturalists seem to entertain a vague belief [like yours?] that the law of heredity applies only to main characters of structure, and not to details; or that though it applies to such details as const.i.tute differences of species, it does not apply to smaller details. The circ.u.mstance that the tendency to repet.i.tion is in a slight degree qualified by the tendency to variation (which ... is but an indirect result of the tendency to repet.i.tion) leads some to doubt whether heredity is unlimited. A careful weighing of the evidence ... will remove the ground for this skepticism." ("Biology," vol. I, p. 239.)

Your statement that the "weak person will always remain weak," but that "the manifestations of his weakness will surely depend on the nature of the obstacles in his way," is a proof that you do not perceive the full reach of the explanation. The manifestations of weakness may be evoked by obstacles, but the nature of those manifestations cannot possibly have anything in common with the nature of the obstacles. The weakness being hereditary, the nature of the obstacle cannot change it.

The case of the Northern nations seems to me direct proof of the contrary to what you suggest. Olaf Trygvesson and others never really changed the national religion, except in name,--no such rapid change would have been possible. The worship of Odin and Thor continued under the name of Christ and the Saints,--and still continues to some extent to influence English life. The shaking-off of ecclesiastical power at a later day,--the protestantizing of the Northern races,--is certainly the manifestation in history of the same fierce love of freedom that founded the Icelandic Republic. So with English limitation of monarchical power, the history of the const.i.tution, etc. So with the superiority of English and Norse seamanship to-day,--Vikings still command our fleet. The changes you cite as evidence of the non-influence of heredity really prove it: they are, moreover, mere surface-shiftings of colour, and do not reach down into the national life. Variations are the result of heredity, not the exceptions to it. The explanation of this fact would necessitate, however, a long discussion on the deepening or weakening of those channels of nerve-force which are the river-courses of life and thought. Similarly, growth--of brain and thought as well as of body--is the consequence, not the contradiction, of inheritance. So with instinct,--which is organized memory,--and with genius, which represents acc.u.mulations of capacity (often at the expense of other growths).

I fear you think of Galton only when you limit the word heredity.

Universal life and growth is touched by the larger meaning: Galton's wonderful books represent merely a domestic paragraph of the subject.

The underlying principles of evolution--the deep laws of physiological growth and development--involve far vaster and profounder consideration of the subject. Inheritance is no "fad:" it means you and me and the world and our central sun.

My text was plain,--but you have forgotten it. I spoke of "ancestral pleasure," "hereditary delight." You deny their possibility. The toys are not ancestral, of course, nor did I say they were,--but they appealed to ancestral feeling. Why? All pleasure is hereditary--every feeling is inherited. Why, then, say so? Because in this case we are considering race-feelings widely differentiated from our own.

But all this is surface,--the ghostly side of the question is the beautiful one, and one which you would not deny without examining the evidence? Perhaps you think that the first time you saw Fuji or Miyanos.h.i.ta, you had really a new sensation. But you had nothing of the kind. The sensations of that new experience in your own life were millions of years old! Far from simple is the commonest of our pleasures, but a layer, infinitely multiple, of myriads of millions of ancestral impressions. Try to a.n.a.lyze the sensation of pleasure in a sunrise, or the smell of hay, and how soon we are lost. We can only cla.s.sify the elements of such a pleasure "by bundles," so to speak.

It might at first sight shock a strong soul to perceive itself not individual and original, but an infinite compound. But I think one's pride in one's good should subsequently expand. The thought that one's strength is the strength of one's ancestors--of a host innumerable and ancient as the race--has its larger consolation. And here is the poetry of the thing. You are my friend B. H. C. But you are much more--you are also Captain B. H., and a host of others--doubtless Viking and Norman and Danish--a procession reaching back into the weird twilight of the Northern G.o.ds.

So much for the fun of our discussion. I won't send the long screed: it is too full of dry stuff, and on reading it over I find that my enthusiasm betrayed me into several wild misstatements.

I am sorry about your cold, and I can sympathize; for I also have been ill, and my boy, and I find spring very trying. I am all right to-day, and so are we all.

Wish I were nineteen years old, and, like Ben, going to sea. As a boy, I cried and made a great fuss because they told me, "You can't go to sea: you are too near-sighted." Perhaps I was saved from disillusions.

You know Frederick Soulie's "Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait."

There was an unconscious recognition of heredity,--before modern biology had been synthetized.

Ever with best wishes and regards, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

KOBE, April, 1895.