TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
August, 1893.

Dear Hendrick,—What you wrote about the charming person “flirting with her maternal instincts” is delicious. I recognized the portrait in a most fantastic past experience,—but of that anon. The thought sent me off into a reverie about—adulteration.

There is a philosophy about adulteration I don’t know much about. I have not sufficiently learned the main facts about the practical and utilitarian side of adulteration,—though I read the “petit dictionnaire des falsifications,” and other things. However, let’s try. Most of what we sell now is adulteration. We used to feel angry, when I was a boy, at the mere thought that leather-composition should be sold for genuine leather,—shoddy for wool,—cotton mixed with silk for pure silk, etc. We wanted our spoons to be genuine silver, and our claret quite trustworthy. Since then we have had to resign ourselves to margarine, glucose, and other products which have become vast staples of commerce. In some cases the genuine has been altogether supplanted by the false; and the false has been universally accepted with full knowledge of its origin. There have been advantages enormous to industry and manufacture, of course; and the public health has not been ruined, according to prediction. On the contrary it has been improving, and the nervous system developing.

Now may not the same thing be going on in our morals? Or rather, must it not go on? We are substituting the sham for the real. It is very sorrowful and excites awful surmises; but nevertheless the sham seems to do very well. The trouble with the original article was its cost and its enormous solidity. It was not malleable. It resisted pressure. It was not adapted at all to the new life of cities and science. For example, absolute veracity interfered with business,—absolute love became a nuisance, took up too much space, and proved too incompressible. Just as we have become too sensitive to bear the rawness of pure colour, so have we become too sensitive to bear the rawness of pure affection. We consider persons vulgar who wear blood-red, grass-green, burning yellows and blues—persons of undeveloped feeling and taste. So also we begin to think people vulgar who are prone to live by any simple emotions. We hold them undeveloped. We don’t want the real thing. No: we want shades, tones,—imperceptible tones, ethereal shades. Even in books the raw emotion has become distasteful, savage. Pure passion is penny-theatrical. Isn’t all this a suggestion of fact? And isn’t the fact founded upon necessary physiological changes? Existing life is too complex for pure emotions. We want mixed tonics,—delicately flavoured and tinted.

All of which means that the primal sources of life are becoming forgotten. Love, honour, idealism, etc., these can no longer be supreme or absorbing motives. They interfere with more serious necessities, and with pleasure. We have first to learn how to live inside the eight-day clock of modern life without getting caught in the cogs. This learned,—and it is no easy lesson,—we may venture to indulge in some falsifications of emotion, some shot-silk colours of love. Such seems to me the drift. The most serious necessity of life is not to take the moral side of it seriously. We must play with it, as with an hetaira.

The genuine is only good for the agricultural districts.

And is this progress in a durable sense, or morbidness in evolution? Really I am not sure.

Ever affectionately,

Lafcadio Hearn.