TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, May, 1894.
Dear Hendrick,— ... I think there was one mistake in the story of [OE]dipus and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the Sphinx’s alternative. It isn’t true that she devoured every one who couldn’t answer her riddles. Everybody meets the Sphinx in life;—so I can speak from authority. She doesn’t kill people like me,—she only bites and scratches them; and I‘ve got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome question,—and I have latterly contented myself with simply telling her, “I don’t know.”
It now seems to me that I was partly wrong in a former letter to you about business morality: I took much too narrow a view of the case, perhaps. The comparison between the Western and Oriental brain—which everybody is forced to make after a few years‘ sojourn here—now appears to me appalling in its results. The Western business man is really a very terrible and wonderful person. He is the outcome, perhaps, of a mediæval wish. For types are created by men’s wishes—just as men themselves are created. The greatest teaching of science is that no Body made us,—but we made ourselves under the smart stimulus of pain. Well, as I was saying, the business man is an answer to a wish. (You know about the frogs who asked Jupiter for a King.) In the age of robber-barons, racks, swordmills, and droit de cuissage,—men prayed Jupiter for Law, Order, System. Jupiter (in the shape of a very, very earnest desire) produced the Business man. He represents insatiate thirst of dominion, supreme intellectual aggressive capacity, faultless practical perceptivity, and the art of handling men exactly like pawns. But he represents also Order, System, Law. He is Organization, and is King of the Earth. The pawns cry out, “We are not pawns.” But he always politely answers, “I am sorry to disagree with you, but I find it expedient for our mutual interest to consider you pawns; besides, I have no time to argue the matter. If you think you are not pawns, you must show the faculty of Organization.”
The tyranny of the future must be that of Organization: the monopoly, the trust, the combination, the associated company—representing supremely perfect mathematical unification of Law, Order, and System. Much more powerful than the robber-baron, or Charlemagne, or Barbarossa, these are infinitely less human,—having no souls, etc. (What would be the use of souls!—souls only waste time.) Business is exact and dangerous and powerful like a colossal dynamo: it is the extreme of everything men used to pray for,—and it is not what they did not pray for. Perhaps they would like the robber-baron better.
We little petty outsiders—the gnats hovering about life—feel the world is changing too quickly: all becoming methodical as an abacus. There isn’t any more room for us. Competition is of no use. Law, Order, and System fill the places without consulting us,—the editorial desks, the clerkships, the Government posts, the publishers‘ offices, the pulpits, the professorships, the sinecures as well as the tough jobs. Where a worker is unnecessary, a pawn is preferred. (Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness!—provided with a good table and a regular supply of reading from Murray’s circulating library!) One thing is dead sure: in another generation there can be no living by dreaming and scheming of art: only those having wealth can indulge in the luxury of writing books for their own pleasure....
Faithfully ever,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, May, 1894.
Dear Hendrick,—So far from your letters not being interesting, they are always full of interest—first, simply because they are your letters; secondly, because they tell the evolution of you—showing how, after all, we are made by the eternal forces. That you become a business man, in every sense of the word, is inevitable. It would be wrong if you did not. It would be wrong not to love your profession. The evil of becoming a business man exists only for small men—dries small men up. Surely you are not small! There is nothing to regret—except perhaps a temporary darkness which may yield to enormous light later on. Some would say to you, “Always keep one little place in your heart from hardening.” I would say nothing of the kind now: I think you are too large to be talked to in that way.