I have begun to think immorality must be, in the eternal order of things, a moral force. That is, some kinds of it,—the aggressive kinds: those which the whole world agrees to call immoral. For the physical value and excellence of a life in its relation to other lives is primarily in its capacity to meet all hostile influences by changes correspondingly effected within itself. This is called adaptation to environment. If this be the physical side of the question, what is the moral side? That the perfect character must be able to oppose or to meet all hostile influences by corresponding changes within itself. This necessarily involves a prodigious experience of evil,—a deep, personal, intimate, artistic, loving knowledge of evil. I see a frightful dualism only in prospect. No love or mercy outside of the circle of each active life. As Spencer holds, absolute morality can only begin where the struggle for existence has ceased. This is not new. The appalling prospect is this,—How infinitely worse the world must become before it begins to improve at all!—And surely education ought to be conducted with a knowledge of these things.
But will the existing state of things continue indefinitely? Surely, it can‘t! It is too monstrous, and the suffering too infernal! There must be social smashings, earthquakes, chaos-breakings-up, recrystallizations to lighten the burthen. And what will these be?
I cannot send you, because there is no copy here, but I recommend you a book,—Pearson’s “National Character,” a study. He takes the ground that the future is not to the white races,—not to the Anglo-Saxon. I think this almost certain. I think of the awful cost of life to the white races,—the more awful cost of character. I think of the vast races of creatures—behemoths and megatheriums and ichthyosaurians—which have disappeared from the earth simply because of the cost of their physical structure. But what is the physical cost of even the structure of an ichthyosaurus to the cost of the structure of a master of applied mathematics! It costs one educated European,—receiving, say, a salary of $100 a month,—exactly as much as it costs twenty educated Orientals to live—each with a family of at least three persons,—or in other words 1 European = 120 Orientals. There is an instinctive knowledge, perhaps, of the future, in the instinctive hatred of the Chinese in America. There is an instinctive sense of the same kind in the feeling which prompts the Oriental to exclude Europeans. The latter overlive the former; the former underlive the latter. But in all this there are complicated physiological questions extraordinary.
Ever affectionately,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, 1893.
Dear Hendrick,— ... “Thou shalt not love” is of Buddha. “He who hath wife and child hath taken upon him fear. Such a fear is greater than that which the man should feel who, unarmed and alone, entering a cavern, meets a tiger face to face.” It is true, the greatest of all fear is the fear for another,—the pity for another,—the frightful imaginings of sorrow or want or despair for another. But there might be perfect conditions. That is true;—but then,—beware the jealousy of the gods. A Rossetti finds his Ideal Maiden, weds, loses, maddens, and passes the rest of his nights in tears of regret, and his days in writing epitaphs. Children may console and they may shame,—and they may die just when they have become charming,—and they may ruin us; and at best, in the world of the West, they separate from us, and we can keep only memories of them. Some woman or some man gets hold of their heart and bites it, and the poison spreads a veil between parents and offspring for all time. Finally, in any conditions, the burthen of life is enormously increased. How much more must a man bear, and how much less can he assert himself, when he has ever to remember that he has ceased to belong to himself. Such is a Buddhist view of the thing. It is not all wrong....
L. H.