Compañia de cuatro
4 Compañia del diablo.
This old Spanish hymn might have been made expressly about me,—except in No. 3. I should feel more at home with you if I knew you would share my letters with nobody. This is all for yourself only. Ever gratefully, with more than regards,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Kōbe, February, 1895.
Dear Chamberlain,—I never liked any letter I got from you more than the last—which brings us closer together. I suppose I have often misread you—being more supersensitive than I ought to be,—and also finding certain of my best friends so differently soul-toned that I am often at a loss to understand hows and whys. But it is curious that we are absolutely at one, after all, on sociological questions, as your letter shows. Undoubtedly the “coming slavery,” predicted by Spencer, will come upon us. A democracy more brutal than any Spartan oligarchy will control life. Men may not be obliged to eat at a public table; but every item of their existence will be regulated by law. The world will be sickened for all time of democracy as now preached. The future tyranny will be worse than any of old,—for it will be a régime of moral rather than physical pain, and there will be no refuge from it—except among savages. But, for all that, the people are good. They will be trapped through their ignorance, and held in slavery by their ignorance; and made, I suppose, in the eternal order, to develop a still higher goodness before they can reach freedom again.
I believe there is no point of your letter in which we are not thoroughly at accord. I have also been inclined to many schools of belief in these matters: I have been at heart everything by turns. It is like the history of one’s religious experiences. And just as when, after emancipating one’s self from the last mesh of the net of creeds, one sees for the first time the value-social and meaning of all, and the moral worth of many,—so in sociological questions, it is by emancipation from faiths in politics that one learns what lies behind all politics,—the necessity of the Conservative vs. the Radical, of the pleb. vs. the aristo. Then, if sympathetic with popular needs one still recognizes the æsthetic and moral value of ranks and orders; or, if belonging to the latter, one learns also to understand that the great, good, unhappy, moral, immoral, vicious, virtuous people are the real soil of all future hope,—the field of the divine in Man.
But for all that, when conditions jar on me, I sometimes grumble and see only evil. What matter? I never look for it as a study. My work—though “no great shakes”—must show you that. At the end of all experiences, bitter and pleasant, I try to sum up good only.