Lafcadio.
Beauties of the landscape—scenery between Tōkyō and Yokohama.
TO MRS. FENOLLOSA
Tōkyō, May, 1899.
Dear Mrs. Fenollosa,—You will be shocked, I fear, when I tell you that I was careless enough to lose the address given me in your last charming letter. Your letters are too precious to be thus mislaid; and I am ashamed of negligence in this case. But though I forgot the address, I forgot no word of the letter,—nor of the previous charming letter, with its quotation from that very clever friend of yours (Miss Very)—the Emerson quotation from the Brahma-poem. I hope you will tell me more about your friend some day; for she seems to be intellectually my friend also. I liked very much what she said, as quoted by you,—who know curiously well how to give pleasure, and do it so generously, notwithstanding such meagre return.
I was struck by the paragraph in your last letter concerning the feeling of understanding a writer better than anybody else in the whole world. You seemed to think it presumptuous to make such a declaration about any writer; but the feeling, I believe, is always true. I have it in regard to all my favourite authors,—especially in regard to certain pages of French writers, like Anatole France, Loti, Michelet, Gautier, Hugo. And I know I am right—though I never can be a critic. The fact is that the greatest critics, each of them, think likewise; and their criticisms prove them correct. No two feel or appreciate an author in exactly the same way: each discerns a different value in him. For no two personalities being the same, and no personal understanding the same, the “equation” makes the judgement unique in this world, and so incomparably valuable, when it is a large one....
The missionaries are furthermore wrong in sending women to the old-fashioned districts. The people do not understand the maiden-missionary, and if she receives a single foreign visitor not of her own sex, the most extraordinary stories are set in circulation. Of course, the people are not malicious in the matter; but they find such a life contrary to all their own social experience, and they judge it falsely in consequence.
For myself I could sympathize with the individual,—but never with the missionary-cause. Unconsciously, every honest being in the mission-army is a destroyer—and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent the edge—the acies, to use the Roman word—of Occidental aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful and selfish civilization demoralizing and crushing a weaker and, in many ways, a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognize the inevitable, the Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by the “noble army.” ...
Lafcadio Hearn.