Part 18
I don't know what to tell you about war-matters. The unjust interference of the three powers has to be considered, though, from two points of view. The first is, that the anger of the nation may create such a feeling in the next Diet as to provoke a temporary suspension of the constitution. The second is that most of us feel the check to Japan was rather in the interest of foreign residents. The feeling against foreigners had been very strong, not without reason, as the foreign newspapers, excepting the _Mail_ and the _Kōbe Chronicle_, had mostly opposed the new treaties, and criticized the war in an unkindly spirit. Besides, there never had been any really good feeling between foreigners and Japanese in the open ports. Now there was really danger that after a roaring triumph, without check, over China, the previous feeling against foreigners would take more violent form. The sympathetic action of England improved the feeling very much; and really I think the check will in the end benefit Japan. She will be obliged to double or triple her naval strength, and wait a generation. In the meantime she will gain much in other power, military and industrial. Then she will be able to tackle Russia,--if she feels as she now does. The army and navy were furiously eager to fight Russia. But Russia has enormous staying power; and the fleets of three nations stood between the 150,000 men abroad and the shores of Japan. Of course it was a risk. England might have settled the naval side of the matter in Japan's favour. But war would have had sad consequences to industry and commerce. The Japanese statesmen were right. Besides, what does Japan lose?--Nothing, except a position; for the retrocession must be heavily paid for. The anger of the people is only a question of national vanity wounded;--and though they would sacrifice everything for war, it is better that they were not suffered by the few wise heads to do so.
I was sorry about your having to slap that fellow. But you will always be the old-style Knight--preferring to give a straight-out blow, than simply to sit down at a desk and score a man every day, unwearyingly, as Northern editors do.
I am glad to hear of Matas. I used to love him very much....
As to kissing in Japan, there is no kissing. Kissing is not "forbidden" at all;--there is simply no impulse to kiss among the Turanian races. All Aryan races have the impulse, as an affectionate greeting. Children do not kiss their parents;--but the pressing of cheek to cheek is nearly the same thing--as a demonstration. Mothers lip their little ones;--but--how shall I explain? The kiss, as we understand it in the Occident, is considered not as an affectionate, but as a _sexual_ impulse, or as of kin to such an impulse. Now this is absolutely true. Undoubtedly the modern kiss of the cultivated West may have no such meaning in 99,997 cases out of 99,998. But the original primitive signification of pressing lip to lip, as Aryan races do, or even lip to cheek, is physiologically traceable to the love which is too often called _l'amour_, but which has little to do with the higher sense of affection. With us the impulse of a child to kiss is absolutely _instinctive_. The Japanese child has no such impulse whatever; but his way of caressing is none the less delicious.
On the other hand, it is significant that the Japanese word for "dear," "lovable" is also used to signify "sweetness" of the material saccharine kind. But perhaps this is offset by the fact that Japanese confectionery, though delicious, never nauseates through over-sweetness; and that the quantity of sugar used is very much less than with us. One never gets tired of _kwashi_; but plumcake and bonbons in the West need to be sparingly used. Perhaps we want too much sweetness of all kinds. The Japanese are in all things essentially temperate and self-restrained--as a people. Of course, Western notions and examples begin to spoil them a little.
It is possible by the time this reaches you that I shall have become a Japanese citizen,--for legal reasons. (Say nothing yet about it.) If I marry my wife before the consul, then she becomes English, and loses the right to hold property in her own country. Marrying her by Japanese custom will not be acknowledged as legal, without special permission of the minister of foreign affairs,--but if I get the permission, then she becomes English, and the _boy_ too. So my marriage, though legal according to every moral code, and according to the old law, becomes illegal by new law, and the wife and family--as I really follow the Japanese code, supporting father, mother, and grandparents--have no rights except through a will, which relatives can dispute. I therefore cut the puzzle by changing nationality, and becoming a Japanese. Then I lose all chance of Government employ at a living salary; for the Englishman who becomes a Japanese is only paid by the Japanese scale. Also I lose the really powerful protection given to Englishmen by their own nation. Finally I have to pay taxes much bigger than consular fees, and my boy becomes liable to military service. (But that won't hurt him.) I hope in any case to give him a scientific education abroad. The trouble is I am now forty-five. I'll be sleeping in some Buddhist cemetery before I can see him quite independent....
I have lost friends because their wives didn't like me--more than once;--as Chamberlain says, "No: you'll never be a ladies' man." But the kindly spirit of Mrs. Baker shows even through your own letters;--and if I can ever see you again, I know that, although not a ladies' man, I won't be disliked in one friend's home as a fugitive visitor. Say everything grateful to her for me that you can.
Good-bye, with love to your pretty gold-head,--and regards to all friends.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
KŌBE, July, 1895.
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--In reading Schopenhauer (I believe you have the splendid Haldane & Kemp version in three volumes: it is said to preserve even the remarkable sonority of the German original), you may notice where Schopenhauer failed, only through want of knowledge undeveloped in his time. While highly appreciating Lamarck,--the greatest of the evolutionists before Darwin, greater even than Goethe,--he finds fault with his theory as not showing proof of the prototype formless animal from which all organic forms existing are derived. Therefore Schopenhauer insisted on the potential prototype existing in the Will only. But since Schopenhauer's day, the material formless prototypal animal has been found; and the theory of Schopenhauer as to forms falls back into a region of pure metaphysics. He is none the less valuable on that account. He represents the soul (psyche) of an enormous fact, or at least a soul which can be fitted to the body of science for the time being. He has been justly called a German Buddhist; and his philosophy is entirely based on the study of Brahmanic and Buddhist texts. The only absolutely novel theory in his book is the essay on sexual love,--vol. 3 in your edition. There is one defect in it, but that does not hurt the value of the whole. And then the splendour of style, of self-assertion, of imagery Huxley equalled only, I think twice, in all of his essays. Of course Schopenhauer belongs to the evolutional school; that is the reason why he has been taken up to-day after long neglect. His work gives new force to evolutional psychology of the new school. The most remarkable popular effect of the newer school has not, I think, yet been noticed. It is in fiction; and the success of a work taken in this line recently has made a fortune for publishers and author. Unfortunately, poor I have not the constructive art necessary to attempt anything of the kind--not yet! Perhaps in twenty years more.
Very faithfully, LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
KŌBE, August, 1895.
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--A delicious surprise,--though one that gave some pain; for I suffered to think you should have used your eyes to such an extent for my sake. Mason, too, one day actually wrote me that he would copy something for me if I needed it (which luckily I had got from another source): I should be pained to have either of you try your eyes for my poor vagaries. Please don't think me too selfish;--it was simply lovable of you, but don't do it again.
I think I may be able to use a fragment or two effectively: what I want now to get is the rhythm used in the singing,--and that none of my people can remember. They said it was very wonderful, but very difficult to catch: so that it would seem some melodies are as hard for the Japanese themselves to learn by ear, as they are for us to so learn. I had the same curious experience at Sakai and in Kizuki; yet I asked persons who had been listening to the singing for several hours, and were natives of the place. They all said, "Ah! that is very difficult. So a good _ondo tori_ is hard to find; and they are paid well to come to our festivals." But when the woman comes again I shall try to syllabify the measure on paper.
I can feel the popular mind in the peasant songs: in the military songs I cannot. But there is a queer variation in tone used in military singing which is very effective. The leader suddenly turns down his voice nearly a full octave, and all the chorus follow: it is like a sudden and terrible menace,--then all go back to high tenor notes again. What you tell me about Ryūkyū priests' songs surprised me. You must have got everything that could be got there in an astonishingly short time. I sent you the Nara _miko_-songs,--mystical hymns about sowing, etc.,--very artless. The Nara and Kompira _miko_ are really virgins. _Entre nous_ I am sorry to say that the _miko_ of Kizuki are not: but, as they ought to be, there is no use specifying in any public way. It would be like denying the virtue of nuns in general, because one or two sisters fall from grace. While the ideal lives anywhere it strikes me as wrong to insist too much on realism.
I know you make a collection of everything relating to Japan, so I must send you a photo of Yuko Hatakeyama. I had it copied from a badly faded one--so it does not come out well. You are not of those who refuse to see beyond the visible; and though there is nothing beautiful or ideal in this figure, it was certainly the earthly chrysalis of a very precious and beautiful soul, which I have tried to make the West love a little bit. So you may prize it.
Some one, thinking to please me, sent me by this mail a large French periodical, full of gravures porno-or semi-pornographiques, Saint Anthony and French courtesans and angels mixed up together. I burned the thing,--astonished at the revulsion of feeling it produced in myself. (The work was beautiful in its way, of course, but the way!) After all, it seems to me that Japanese life is essentially chaste: its ideals are chaste. I can feel now exactly how a Japanese feels about certain foreign tendencies. I know all about Japanese picture-books of a certain class--innocent things in their very frankness: there is more real evil, or at least more moral weakness in any number of certain French public prints. It strikes me also that the charm even of the _jōro_ to the Japanese mind is quite different from any corresponding Western feeling. She figures simply as an ideal lady of old time, and the graces cultivated in her, and the costume donned, are those of an ideal past. The animalism of half-exposures and suggestions of whole exposures is not any more Japanese than it was old-Persian. Even the naughty picture-books were intended for imitations, catechism.
Talking of catechism, I have been thinking of making a Buddhist catechism of a somewhat fantastic sort.
"How old are you?"
"I am millions of millions of years old, as a phenomenon. As absolute I am eternal and older than the universe," etc.
Faithfully ever, LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
KŌBE, September, 1895.
DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... I am waiting every day for the sanction of the minister to change my name; and I think it will come soon. This will make me Koizumi Yakumo, or,--arranging the personal and family names in English order,--"Y. Koizumi." "Eight clouds" is the meaning of "Yakumo," and is the first part of the most ancient poem extant in the Japanese language. (You will find the whole story in "Glimpses"--article "Yaegaki.") Well, "Yakumo" is a poetical alternative for Izumo, my beloved province, "the Place of the Issuing of Clouds." You will understand how the name was chosen.
If all goes well, and I am not obliged to return to America, I shall next year probably return to Izumo, and make a permanent home there. So long as I can travel in winter, I need not care about the weather. When my boy grows big enough, if I live, I shall take him abroad, and try to give him a purely scientific education--modern languages if possible, no waste of time on Latin, Greek, and stupidities. (Literature and history can be best learned at home; and the greatest men are not the products of schools, not in England or America, at least: Germany is an exception.) He might turn out to be very commonplace, in which case all plans must be changed; but I suspect he will not be stupid. He says, by the way, that he was a doctor in his former birth. It is quite possible, for he has my father's eyes.
In regard to what you asked me about the English literature business, I think there is no way of teaching English literature except by selections,--joined together with an evolutional study of English emotional life, illustrated after the manner of Taine's "Art in Italy," etc. But such work, combining history with literature, would involve the use of an immense library, and would be very costly to the teacher. By the way, I _hate_ English literature. French literature is much more interesting. What I should most like would be to make a study of comparative literature--including Sanscrit, Finnish, Arabic, Persian,--systematizing the best specimens of each into kindred groupings on the evolutional plan. That _would_ be worth doing; for it means a study of the evolutional development of all mankind. But such undertakings, I fear, are for the extremely rich.
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
KŌBE, Autumn, 1895.
DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... It has often occurred to me to ask whether you think other men feel as I do about some things--you yourself, for example. Work with me is a pain--no pleasure till it is done. It is not voluntary; it is not agreeable. It is forced by necessity. The necessity is a curious one. The mind, in my case, eats itself when unemployed. Reading, you might suggest, would employ it. No: my thoughts wander, and the gnawing goes on just the same. What kind of gnawing? Vexation and anger and imaginings and recollections of unpleasant things said or done. _Unless somebody does or says something horribly mean to me, I can't do certain kinds of work_,--the tiresome kinds, that compel a great deal of thinking. The exact force of a hurt I can measure at the time of receiving it: "This will be over in six months;" "This I shall have to fight for two years;" "This will be remembered longer." When I begin to think about the matter afterwards, then I rush to work. I write page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional, romantic,--throw them aside. Then next day, I go to work rewriting them. I rewrite and rewrite them till they begin to define and arrange themselves into a whole,--and the result is an essay; and the editor of the _Atlantic_ writes, "It is a veritable illumination,"--and no mortal man knows why, or how it was written,--not even I myself,--or what it cost to write it. Pain is therefore to me of exceeding value betimes; and everybody who does me a wrong indirectly does me a right. I wonder if anybody else works on this plan. The benefit of it is that a _habit_ is forming,--a habit of studying and thinking in a way I should otherwise have been too lazy-minded to do. But whenever I begin to forget one burn, new caustic from some unexpected quarter is poured into my brain: then the new pain forces other work. It strikes me as being possibly a peculiar morbid condition. If it is, I trust that some day the power will come to do something really extraordinary--I mean very unique. What is the good of having a morbid sensitive spot, if it cannot be utilized to some purpose worth achieving?
There was a funny suicide here the other day. A boy of seventeen threw himself on the railroad track and was cut to pieces by a train. He left a letter to his employer, saying that the death of the employer's little son had made the world dark for him. The child would have nobody to play with: so, he said, "I shall go to play with him. But I have a little sister of six;--I pray you to take care of her."
Ever affectionately, LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
SEPTEMBER, 1895.
MY DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--Your paper on Luchu gave me more pleasure, I am sure, than it even did to the president of the society before whom it was read; and I was delighted with the nice things said of you. Of course this paper--being a much more elaborate monograph than the other--differs from its predecessor in the matter of suggestiveness. To me it is like a graded anthropological map,--shading off the direction of character-tendencies, language, customs, to the uttermost limit of the subject. I had no idea how much you had been doing in the Archipelago--your own field of research by unquestionable right. If I ever go down there I shall certainly attempt nothing out of the much humbler line which I can follow: there is really nothing left for another man to do in the way of gathering general knowledge about an unfamiliar region.
There is one expression of opinion in the monograph which I may venture a remark about. The idea is growing upon me, more and more each day I live, that the supposed indifferentism of the Japanese in religious matters is affected indifferentism--that it is put on like _yofuku_, only for foreigners. I see too much of the real life, even here in Kōbe, to think the indifferentism real. And I believe the Jesuits, who are better judges far than our comfortable modern proselytizers, never accused the Japanese of indifference. However, this is but suggestive: I think that should you ever find time to watch the incidents of common life minutely, you will recognize the Jesuits as the keenest observers. As for the educated classes, I have also reason to know that in most cases the indifference is feigned. This will show you how my own opinions have changed in five years' time.
Very truly yours, LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO SENTARŌ NISHIDA
KŌBE, October, 1895.
DEAR NISHIDA,--Kazuo knows your picture, always hanging on the wall by my desk, and your name--so that if you see him soon, he will not think you a stranger. He talks well now, but is getting naughty, like his father used to be--very naughty. I see my own childish naughtiness all over again. I think he will be cleverer than his father. If he shows real talent, I shall try to take him to France or to Italy, later on in life. English schools I don't like: they are too rough. New England schools are better; especially for the earlier teaching. The systems of Spencer and others have been much better followed out in Eastern Massachusetts than in England, where religious conservatism persists in loading the minds with perfectly useless acquirements. The future demands scientific education--not ornamented; and the thoroughly trained man never needs help. I remember a friend in the United States Army,--engineer and graduate of West Point (a splendid institution): he was coaxed out of the army by an electrical company because of his knowledge of applied mathematics. What wonderful men one meets among the scientifically educated to-day one must go abroad to know. Such men, unfortunately, do not come to Japan. If _they_ had been chosen for teachers, I fancy that education would have felt their influence. It does not feel the influence of common foreign teachers. But, a student said to me, "We must cultivate our own powers through our own language hereafter,"--and I think he expressed the sensible general feeling of the day.
Ever with kindest hopes and wishes for you,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
KŌBE, November, 1895.
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--Your more than gracious flying visit, having set in motion the machinery of converse, left me long continuing a phantom talk with a phantom professor across a real table,--which I touched to make sure.
Then my wife's delight with her Miyako-miyage, and the boy's with the pictures, you can imagine,--though not perhaps my own feeling of mingled pleasure and sorrow. Whatever you do is done so delicately and finely that I fear I could show no appreciation of it in writing.
It was lucky that we had returned from Kyōto just so as to be here for your visit. What pleased me most of all, perhaps, was your seeing my boy. I have often thought if I can realize my dream of taking him to Europe, which now seems quite possible, I might some day have the pleasure of presenting him as a man.
You wanted a thinking book; and I must confess that is now my own want: I care only for a novel when it illustrates some new philosophical idea, or when it possesses such art that it can be studied for the art alone. Perhaps Lombroso would interest (and revolt) you at the same time: Nordau is only a new edition of Lombroso, I think--a journalistic one. I detest his generalizations, so far as I know them through extracts: all being false that I have seen. Progress depends on variation; and the morale of Nordau would lead to, or accentuate, already existing Chinese notions in the conventional world, that all departures from formality and humbug are to be explained by degeneration. Without having read it, I should judge the book a shallow one,--much at variance with Spencer's views on eccentricity and its values. Of the Italian school, Mantegazza most appeals to me, and would, I think to you--though he is sentimental as Michelet in "L'Amour." ...
You think me too dissatisfied, don't you? It is true I am not satisfied, and already unable to look at my former work. But the moment a man can feel satisfied with himself, progress stops. He can only move along a level afterwards; and I hope the level is still some years off. (I see a possibility to strive for; but I am afraid even to speak of it--so well out of reach it now is.) But what you will be glad to hear is that my publishers are treating me well enough. I have up to September made about 2000 yen (Japanese money), and prospects of making about 4000 in 1896. It is now largely a question of eyes.