Dear Professor,—Your kind letter of July 20th is with me....
I am so glad to hear that you are not likely to be obliged to leave Europe. It is perhaps the greatest possible misfortune for a man of culture to find himself obliged to withdraw from intellectual centres to a new raw country, where the higher mental life is still imperfectly understood. There are certain compensations, indeed,—such as larger freedom, and release from useless conventions, but these do not fully make up for the sterility of that American atmosphere in which the more delicate flowers of thought refuse to grow. I am delighted to think of your prospective pleasure in the Italian paradise.
I am writing to you from the little fishing-village of Yaidzu—where there are no tables or chairs.
Bellesort’s book is a surprisingly good book in its way. It describes only the disintegration of Japanese society—under the contact of Western ideas—the social putrefaction, the dégringolade of things. As a book dealing with this single unpleasant phase of Japanese existence, it is a very powerful book; and there are some touching pages in it. It was I who gave Bellesort the story of the little boy who committed suicide when falsely accused of stealing a cake,—and he made good use of it.... I don’t think that he is able to see the beautiful out of conventional limits; and he mostly confines himself to the directions in which he is strong. I am inclined to believe that his sympathies are clerical—that he presents Brunetière and the Jesuit side of things. However, his book is the best thing of its kind yet produced—the critical kind. It requires a special nervous structure, like that of Pierre Loti, to see the strange beauty of Japan. Let me, however, advise you to read many times the charming book of the American, Percival Lowell,—“The Soul of the Far East.” It is strange that Lowell should have written the very best book in the English language on the old Japanese life and character, and the most startling astronomical book of the period,—“Mars,”—more interesting than any romance....
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Tōkyō, September, 1902.
My dear Hendrick,—I had to wait several days before answering your letter,—as I felt too much pleased to venture writing for that length of time. And now, in answering, I shall have to talk a great deal about myself, and my own affairs,—which seems to me rather graceless.
All that you proposed, except two things, appear to me very good. But to put the question in the best general way, I am convinced by long experience that I can do nothing profitable with publishers, except at such serious cost to health and to literary reputation as would be utterly prohibitive. What I have been able to do so far has been done mostly in dead opposition to publishers, and their advisers; and in the few cases where I tried to do what publishers wished I have made very serious mistakes.
Editorial work on a monthly or weekly paper, with a sympathetic head, who would let me have my own way, and use a typewriter—let me agree to furnish at fixed intervals certain material, while free to use the over-time as I pleased—would be good....