TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
November, 1892.
Dear Old Fellow,— ... What a beastly nightmare that woman who married the preacher! High-pressure civilization only produces these types.—But, Lord! what is to be the end?... The race will still be to the mentally strong as well as to the physically strong. But the women fit for fertile maternity, and equally fit to discuss the fourth dimension of space, are yet rare,—and apt to be a little terrible. The cost of intellectual race-expansion is more terrible,—is frightful; and then the expansion cannot ever become universal. The many must profit by the few. To make 1 of the few, there must be, I suppose, at least 111,111 of such monstrosities created as that one you wrote of.
Isn’t the hunger for the eternal feminine much like the other hunger?—to be completely exorcised in the same way. Marriage seems to me the certain destruction of all that emotion and suffering,—so that one afterwards looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into the friendship of marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see the dangerous sea-currents, running like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I’m a poor judge of such matters) that it doesn’t make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife—unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more lovable: so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness. For intellectual converse a man can’t have really with women: womanhood is antagonistic to it. And emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the god come equally near to the eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilization is really a terrible problem: there are so many questions involved.
Oh!—you talk of being without intellectual companionship! O ye Eight Hundred Myriads of Gods! What would you do if you were me. Lo! the illusion is gone!—Japan in Kyūshū is like Europe;—except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an educated Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. Here is an astounding fact. The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child—perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated, the further you push him from you. Why? Because there the race-antipodalism shows itself. As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis sweetness, sympathy, friendship. Now, my scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the college (two miles away) by jinrikisha and return after class,—always alone, no mental company but books. But at home everything is sweet.
At the college there is always a recess of half an hour at noon, for dining. I do not dine, but climb the hill behind the college. There is a grey old cemetery, where “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.” From between the tombs I can look down on the Dai Go Kōtō Chūgakkō, with its huge modern brick buildings and its tumultuous life, as in a bird’s-eye view. I am only there never alone. For Buddha sits beside me, and also looks down upon the college through his half-closed eyelids of stone. There is moss on his nose and his hands,—moss on his back, of course! And I always say to him: “O Master, what do you think of all this?—is it not vanity? There is no faith there, no creed, no thought of the past life nor of the future life, nor of Nirvana,—only chemistry and cube-geometry and trigonometry,—and the most damnable ‘English language.‘” He never answers me; but he looks very sad,—smiles just like one who has received an injury which he cannot return,—and you know that is the most pathetic of all smiles. And the snakes twist before my feet as I descend to the sound of the bell.—There is my only companion for you! but I like him better than those who look like him waiting for me in the classroom. Ever with best regards,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO SENTARŌ NISHIDA
Kumamoto, January, 1893.
Dear Nishida,—I do not know how to thank you enough for your last letter;—indeed I must tell you frankly that I felt ashamed of having put you to such trouble involuntarily, for I had no idea how complicated the matter was when I wrote to you for information about the origin of the belief. And now let me beg of you never to take so much trouble again on my account. I think I can hear you protesting that it was only a pleasure. I am sure it was a pleasure to help me; but I am too much of a literary man not to know exactly the time-cost of the work, especially in a language not your own. So I will again beg you not to take so much trouble for me at any future time—as it would cause me pain.