TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, April, 1893.
Dear Hendrick,— ... I hear rarely from America, and have no definite news from Boston up to date. They send me a paper—the Sunday edition, full of poetry about love, woodcuts of beauties of fashion, and all sorts of chatter about women and new styles of undergarments. To-day, after three years in the most Eastern East, when I look at that paper, I can hardly believe my eyes. The East has opened my eyes. How affected the whole thing seems! Yet it never seemed so to me before. My students say to me, “Dear Teacher, why are your English novels all filled with nonsense about love and women?—we do not like such things.” Then I tell them partly why. “You must know, my dear young gentlemen, that in England and America, marriage is a most important matter,—though it is something you never even speak about in Japan. For in Japan, it is as easy to get married as it is to eat a bowl of rice. But for educated young men in the West, it is very difficult and dangerous to marry. It is necessary to be rich to marry well,—or to be, at least, what you would call rich. And the struggle for life is very bitter and very terrible—so bitter and terrible that you cannot possibly imagine what it means. It is hard to live at all,—made harder to marry. Therefore the whole object of life is to succeed in order to get married. And the parents have nothing to do with the matter, as in Japan; the young man must please the girl, and must win her away from all other young men who want to get her. That is why the English and others write all that stuff about love and beauty and marriage, and why everybody buys those books and laughs or weeps over them—though to you they are simply disgusting.”
But that was not all the truth. The whole truth is always suggested to me by the Sunday paper. We live in the musky atmosphere of desire in the West;—an erotic perfume emanates from all that artificial life of ours;—we keep the senses perpetually stimulated with a million ideas of the eternal feminine; and our very language reflects the strain. The Western civilization is using all its arts, its sciences, its philosophy in stimulating and exaggerating and exacerbating the thought of sex. An Oriental would almost faint with astonishment and shame to see a Western ballet. He would scream at the sight of a French nude. He would be scandalized by a Greek statue. He would rightly and instantly estimate all this as being exactly what it is,—artificial stimulus of dangerous senses. The whole West is steeped in it. It now seems, even to me, almost disgusting.
Yet what does it mean? Certainly it pollutes literature, creates and fosters a hundred vices, accentuates the misery of those devoted by the law of life as the victims of lust. It turns art from Nature to sex. It cultivates one æsthetic faculty at the expense of all the rest. And yet—perhaps its working is divine behind all that veil of vulgarity and lustfulness. It is cultivating also, beyond any question, a capacity for tenderness the Orient knows nothing of. Tenderness is not of the Orient man. He is without brutality, but he is also without that immense reserve force of deep love and forgiving-power which even the rougher men of the West have. The Oriental is intellectually, rationally capable of all self-sacrifice and loyalty: he does the noblest and grandest things without even the ghost of a tender feeling. His feeblest passion is that of sex, because with him the natural need has never been starved or exasperated. He marries at sixteen or seventeen perhaps,—is a father of two or three children at twenty. All that sort of thing for him belongs to the natural appetites: he would no more talk about his wife or tell you he had a child born, than he would tell you that his organs performed their function regularly at 6.30 A.M. He is ashamed of appearing to have any sexual love at all in public;—and his family live all their lives in the shadow—do not appear to visitors. Well, his nature may lose something by this. It loses certainly in capacities that mean everything for us—tenderness, deep sympathy, a world of sensations not indeed sexual with us, yet surely developed out of sexualism to no small extent,—just as the sense of moral beauty developed out of the sense of physical beauty.
I guess this must bore you, however. More anon of other matters.
Ever faithfully,
Lafcadio Hearn.