COLLATERAL READINGS
| Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan | Lafcadio Hearn |
| Out of the East | " " |
| Kokoro | " " |
| Kwaidan | " " |
| A Japanese Miscellany | " " |
| Two Years in the French West Indies | " " |
| Japanese Life in Town and Country | G.W. Knox |
| Our Neighbors the Japanese | J.K. Goodrich |
| When I Was Young | Yoshio Markino |
| Miss John Bull | " " |
| When I Was a Boy in Japan | Sakae Shioya |
| Japanese Girls and Women | Alice M. Bacon |
| A Japanese Interior | " " |
| Japonica | Sir Edwin Arnold |
| Japan | W.E. Griffis |
| Human Bullets | Tadayoshy Sukurai |
| The Story of Japan | R. Van Bergen |
| A Boy in Old Japan | " " |
| Letters from Japan | Mrs. Hugh Frazer |
| Unbeaten Tracks in Japan | Isabella Bird (Bishop) |
| The Lady of the Decoration | Frances Little |
| Little Sister Snow | " " |
| Japan in Pictures | Douglas Sladen |
| Old and New Japan (good illustrations in color) | Clive Holland |
| Nogi | Stanley Washburn |
| Japan, the Eastern Wonderland | D.C. Angus |
| Peeps at Many Lands: Japan | John Finnemore |
| Japan Described by Great Writers | Esther Singleton |
| The Flower of Old Japan [verse] | Alfred Noyes |
| Dancing and Dancers of To-day | Caroline and Chas. H. Coffin |
| The Healthful Art of Dancing | L.H. Gulick |
| The Festival Book | J.E.C. Lincoln |
| Folk Dances | Caroline Crawford |
| Lafcadio Hearn | Nina H. Kennard |
| Lafcadio Hearn (Portrait) | Edward Thomas |
| The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn | Elizabeth Bisland |
| The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn | " " |
| Lafcadio Hearn in Japan | Yone Noguchi |
| Lafcadio Hearn (Portraits) | Current Literature 42:50 |
LETTERS
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Ponkapog, Mass., Dec. 13, 1875.
Dear Howells,—We had so charming a visit at your house that I have about made up my mind to reside with you permanently. I am tired of writing. I would like to settle down in just such a comfortable home as yours, with a man who can work regularly four or five hours a day, thereby relieving one of all painful apprehensions in respect to clothes and pocket-money. I am easy to get along with. I have few unreasonable wants and never complain when they are constantly supplied. I think I could depend on you.
Ever yours,
T.B.A.
P.S.—I should want to bring my two mothers, my two boys (I seem to have everything in twos), my wife, and her sister.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH TO E.S. MORSE
Dear Mr. Morse:
It was very pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (at which I guessed).
There's a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours—it never grows old; it never loses its novelty. One can say to one's self every morning: "There's that letter of Morse's. I haven't read it yet. I think I'll take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few days to make out what he means by those t's that look like w's, and those i's that haven't any eyebrows."
Other letters are read, and thrown away, and forgotten; but yours are kept forever—unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
Admiringly yours,
T.B. Aldrich.
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY TO JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
The Quadrangle Club,
Chicago, September 30, '99.
Your generous praise makes me rather shamefaced: you ought to keep it for something that counts. At least other people ought: you would find a bright ringing word, and the proportion of things would be kept. As for me, I am doing my best to keep the proportion of things, in the midst of no-standards and a dreary dingy fog-expanse of darkened counsel. Bah! here I am whining in my third sentence, and the purpose of this note was not to whine, but to thank you for heart new-taken. I take the friendly words (for I need them cruelly) and forget the inadequate occasion of them. I am looking forward with almost feverish pleasure to the new year, when I shall be among friendships which time and absence and half-estrangements have only made to shine with a more inward light; and when, so accompanied, I can make shift to think and live a little. Do not wait till then to say Welcome.
W.V.M.
BRET HARTE TO HIS WIFE
Lawrence, Kansas,
October 24, 1873.
My dear Anna,—
I left Topeka—which sounds like a name Franky might have invented—early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o'clock at night—an hour before the lecture. The engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o'clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight. But I got a saddle-horse—there was no vehicle to be had—and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy—who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure—with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards Atchison. I got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after.
I make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted man who glared at that audience over his desk that night.... And yet it was a good audience, thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. I was very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and I had been told that Atchison was a rough place—energetic but coarse. I think I wrote you from St. Louis that I had found there were only three actual engagements in Kansas, and that my list which gave Kansas City twice was a mistake. So I decided to take Atchison. I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for yourself, Nan, to buy "Minxes" with, if you want, for it is over and above the amount Eliza and I footed up on my lecture list. I shall send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are settled.
Everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night I have one more to close Kansas, and then I go on to St. Joseph. I've been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which these Western people seem to have for me. They seem to have read everything I have written—and appear to appreciate the best. Think of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue shirt repeating to me Concepcion de Arguello! Their strange good taste and refinement under that rough exterior—even their tact—are wonderful to me. They are "Kentucks" and "Dick Bullens" with twice the refinement and tenderness of their California brethren....
I've seen but one [woman] that interested me—an old negro wench. She was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but her laugh was so sweet and unctuous and musical—so full of breadth and goodness that I went outside and talked to her while she was scrubbing the stones. She laughed as a canary bird sings—because she couldn't help it. It did me a world of good, for it was before the lecture, at twilight, when I am very blue and low-toned. She had been a slave.
I expected to have heard from you here. I've nothing from you or Eliza since last Friday, when I got yours of the 12th. I shall direct this to Eliza's care, as I do not even know where you are.
Your affectionate
Frank.
LAFCADIO HEARN TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
[Kumamoto, Japan]
January 17, 1893.
Dear Chamberlain,—
I'm writing just because I feel lonesome; isn't that selfish? However, if I can amuse you at all, you will forgive me. You have been away a whole year,—so perhaps you would like to hear some impressions of mine during that time. Here goes.
The illusions are forever over; but the memory of many pleasant things remains. I know much more about the Japanese than I did a year ago; and still I am far from understanding them well. Even my own little wife is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way. Of course a man and woman know each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand. Let me tell one. In Oki we fell in love with a little Samurai boy, who was having a hard time of it, and we took him with us. He is now like an adopted son,—goes to school and all that. Well, I wished at first to pet him a little, but I found that was not in accordance with custom, and that even the boy did not understand it. At home, I therefore scarcely spoke to him at all; he remained under the control of the women of the house. They treated him kindly,—though I thought coldly. The relationship I could not quite understand. He was never praised and rarely scolded. A perfect code of etiquette was established between him and all the other persons in the house, according to degree and rank. He seemed extremely cold-mannered, and perhaps not even grateful, that was, so far as I could see. Nothing seemed to move his young placidity,—whether happy or unhappy his mien was exactly that of a stone Jizo. One day he let fall a little cup and broke it. According to custom, no one noticed the mistake, for fear of giving him pain. Suddenly I saw tears streaming down his face. The muscles of the face remained quite smilingly placid as usual, but even the will could not control tears. They came freely. Then everybody laughed, and said kind things to him, till he began to laugh too. Yet that delicate sensitiveness no one like me could have guessed the existence of.
But what followed surprised me more. As I said, he had been (in my idea) distantly treated. One day he did not return from school for three hours after the usual time. Then to my great surprise, the women began to cry,—to cry passionately. I had never been able to imagine alarm for the boy could have affected them so. And the servants ran over town in real, not pretended, anxiety to find him. He had been taken to a teacher's house for something relating to school matters. As soon as his voice was heard at the door, everything was quiet, cold, and amiably polite again. And I marvelled exceedingly.
Sensitiveness exists in the Japanese to an extent never supposed by the foreigners who treat them harshly at the open ports.... The Japanese master is never brutal or cruel. How Japanese can serve a certain class of foreigners at all, I can't understand....
This Orient knows not our deeper pains, nor can it even rise to our larger joys; but it has its pains. Its life is not so sunny as might be fancied from its happy aspect. Under the smile of its toiling millions there is suffering bravely hidden and unselfishly borne; and a lower intellectual range is counterbalanced by a childish sensitiveness to make the suffering balance evenly in the eternal order of things.
Therefore I love the people very much, more and more, the more I know them....
And with this, I say good-night.
Ever most truly,
Lafcadio Hearn.
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Shady Hill, 2 May, 1902.
"The Kentons" have been a great comfort to me. I have been in my chamber, with a slight attack of illness, for two or three weeks, and I received them one morning. I could not have had kinder or more entertaining visitors, and I was sorry when, after two or three days, I had to say Good-bye to them. They are very "natural" people, "just Western." I am grateful to you for making me acquainted with them.
"Just Western" is the acme of praise. I think I once told you what pleasure it gave me as a compliment. Several years ago at the end of one of our Christmas Eve receptions, a young fellow from the West, taking my hand and bidding me Good-night, said with great cordiality, "Mr. Norton, I've had a delightful time; it's been just Western"!
"The Kentons" is really, my dear Howells, an admirable study of life, and as it was read to me my chief pleasure in listening was in your sympathetic, creative imagination, your insight, your humour, and all your other gifts, which make your stories, I believe, the most faithful representations of actual life that were ever written. Other stories seem unreal after them, and so when we had finished "The Kentons," nothing would do for entertainment but another of your books: so now we are almost at the end of "Silas Lapham," which I find as good as I found it fifteen or sixteen years ago. As Gray's idea of pleasure was to lie on a sofa and have an endless succession of stories by Crébillon,—mine is to have no end of Howells!...