A paper read by Spencer before the Anthropological Society, on the subject of the Method of Comparative Psychology, came into my hands the other day. It was only four or five pages—so I could read it. What a magnificent teaching for an essay on Japanese psychology! I may try to take up the theme some day. There are some terrible suggestions, however—such as that the Japanese indifference to abstract ideas is not indifference, but incapacity to form general ideas. The language would seem to confirm the suggestion.
P. S. I should like to discuss the “heredity and evolution” topic of child-feeling, but fear to weary you with my scribble. Indeed I wrote a long letter, but concluded not to send to-day. You are quite right about the inherited feeling of the impulse to martial play: the new toy would represent subjectively some slight modifications of inherited pleasure as regards colour, form, and noise,—but the inherited feeling remains the chief factor in the matter. A mask of o tafuku as a toy would not effect modifications in the quality of certain inherited impressions, but only accentuate them, and accentuate others innumerable faintly connected with them.
Ever, with regret that I cannot write more for the moment, yours faithfully,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Kōbe, 1895.
Dear Chamberlain,—I might one of these days get a job in Loochoo, when the country becomes richer,—and explore ghostology. The ghost-business must be simply immense: it must be immense anywhere that the dead are better housed than the living. Of old I felt sure that if the Egyptian demotic texts were translated, the ghostly side of that literature would be amazing—for just the same reason. Well, they have been translated; and the ghost-stories are without parallel. Assyrian ghostology is also very awful; but we don’t know much about their necropoles,—for whatever those were, they were of perishable stuff.
As I told the Houghton firm I had a volume of philosophical fairy-tales in mind, and wanted to read Andersen again, they sent me four volumes; ... the old charm comes back with tenfold force, and makes me despair. How great the art of the man!—the immense volume of fancy,—the magical simplicity—the astounding force of compression! This isn’t mere literary art; it is a soul photographed and phonographed and put, like electricity, in storage. To write like Andersen, one must be Andersen. But the fountain of his inspiration is unexhausted, and I hope to gain by drinking from it. I read, and let the result set up disturbances interiorly. Disturbances emotional I need. I have had no sensations since leaving Kyūshū.
Lafcadio Hearn.