Lafcadio.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Tōkyō, 1897.
Dear Hendrick,— ... You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with which we look at a thing,—half angered by inability to analyze within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think the feeling is unanalyzable, simply because, as Kipling says in that wonderful narrative, “The Finest Story in the World,” “the doors have been shut behind us.” The pleasure you felt in looking at that tree, at that lawn,—all the pleasure of the quaint summer in that charming old city,—was it only your pleasure? There is really no singular,—no “I.” “I” is surely collective. Otherwise we never could explain fully those movements within us caused by the scent of hay,—by moonlight on summer waters,—by certain voice tones that make the heart beat quicker,—by certain colours and touches and longings. The law that inherited memory becomes transmuted into intuitions or instincts is not absolute. Only some memories, or rather parts of them, are so transformed. Others remain—will not die. When you felt the charm of that tree and that lawn,—many who would have loved you were they able to live as in other days, were looking through you and remembering happy things. At least I think it must have been so. The different ways in which different places and things thus make appeal would be partly explained;—the supreme charm referring to reminiscences reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest. But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home—in which happy generations have been. Then how much dead love lives again, and how many ecstasies of the childhoods of a hundred years must revive! We do not all die,—said the ancient wise man. How much of us dies is an unutterable mystery.
Science is rather provoking here. She tells us we are advancing toward equilibration, to be followed by dissolution, to be succeeded by another evolution, to end in another disintegration—and so on forever. Why a cosmos must be dissipated into a nebula, and the nebula again resolved into a sun-swarm, she confesses that she does not know. There is no comfort in her except the comfort of doubt,—and that is wholesome. But she says one encouraging thing. No thought can utterly perish. As all life is force, the record of everything must pass into the infinite. Now what is this force that shapes and unshapes universes? Might it be old thoughts and words and passions of men? The ancient East so declares. There can be rest eternal only when—not in one petty world, but throughout all the cosmos—the Good only lives. Here all is, of course, theory and ignorance,—for all we know. Still the faith ought to have value. How would the well-balanced man try to live if once fully persuaded that his every thought would affect not only the future of himself, but of the universe! The other day something queer happened. I was vexed about something wrong that had been done at a distance. Some days after, one said to me: “The other day, while you were so angry, people were killed”—mentioning the place. “I know that,” I said. “But do you not feel sorry?” “Why should I feel sorry?—I did not kill anybody.” “How do you know you did not? Your anger might have been added to the measure of the anger that caused the wrong.” Unto this I could not reply. Thinking over the matter, indeed, who can say what his life may be to the life of the unseen about him?
Ever very affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
1897.
Dear Hendrick,— ... The idea of a set of philosophical fairy-tales often haunts me. One doesn’t need to go to the Orient for the material. It is everywhere. The Elle-woman is real. So are the Sirens, Circe, and the Sphinx and Herakles and Admetos and Alkestis. So are the Harpies, and Medusa, and the Fates who measure and cut and spin. But when I try, I find myself unable to create for want of a knowledge of every-day life,—that life which is the only life the general reader understands or cares about.