Volume II Part 11 (1/2)

Professor Chamberlain, my other friend, spent a few days with me last week He speaks japanese better than the japanese;--in fact, he is _Professor of japanese in the Imperial University of japan_ He mentions me in his books; and Conder, rites those beautiful books about japanese flower arrangeardens, has just written a book with a kindly reference to h to tire you, I fear, already Well, _au revoir_, till the next mail Affectionately ever,

LAFCADIO HEARN

TO SENTARO NIshi+DA

kumAMOTO, April, 1893

MY DEAR NIshi+DA,--About the sentence that puzzles you (as it well ht puzzle anybody unaccustonifies the Bible It is based on the idea that Christ is the ”_Light_ of the World” (Light and Glory being used synonyoes back beyond Christianity into ancient Gnostic ideas,--_probably_ based on the Iranian belief of Oruished from Ahriman, the Spirit of Evil and Darkness The co of this; but from childhood, they are accustoht” and ”glory” and ”illu a Bible surrounded with rays of light bealory of thethe darkness of labour, the suffering and glooht of consolation, etc--But I must say that all this is e call ”rant” (worse than ”cant”);--it is of no earthly use to let the boys read it I used always to skip it The article is not even good English: it is fanatical ”gush” and hu If I were you, I would not bother with it at all,--except for your own amusement, as a study of queer ideas I don'tof this sort is bad;--soh the ideas be false But that stuff in Sanders's Reader is the sort we call ”_cheap_ rant,”--such as any uneducated Sunday-school teacher can spout by the ain this year I expect to become a father about September, or perhaps even sooner So we shall not see Tokyo in 1893, at all events And the chances are that I shall not be able to travel very far;--as I shall have to be in constant weekly communication with the mail-steamers for America The preparation of the printed proofs will be hard work

I am sorry about Goto You suo--We have a wonderful drawing-master here, who painted a wonderful oil-portrait of Mr Akizuki And thatthe deduction of his salary for building warshi+ps)!

Yet he is really a fine artist

Besides the letter of introduction I gave you to Mr Kano, I also wrote hio to Tokyo, therefore, remind him of that Or, if you wish, I rite you at once a third letter to take with you You will like Mr Kano at sight He charners, and still he is perfectly easy and simple in his manners Faithfully yours,

LAFCADIO HEARN

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 fashi+on, and all sorts of chatter about woarments 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 openedseems! Yet it never seemed so to me before My students say to lish novels all filled with nonsense about love and wos” Then I tell theentlee is ayou never even speak about in japan For in japan, it is as easy to geterous 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 iine 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 getto do with the irl, and et her That is why the English and others write all that stuff about love and beauty and hs or weeps over the”

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 e reflects the strain The Western civilization is using all its arts, its sciences, its philosophy in stiht of sex An Oriental would almost faint with astonishment and shaht of a French nude He would be scandalized by a Greek statue He would rightly and instantly esti exactly what it is,--artificial stierous senses The whole West is steeped in it It now see

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 aesthetic 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 i-pohich 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 his 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 perforularly at 630 AM He is asha 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 natureby this It loses certainly in capacities thatfor 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

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

kumAMOTO, June, 1893

DEAR HENDRICK,--I aht about the Oriental view of things It is very difficult to understand at first

It is not want of refines It is rather a tendency to silence and secrecy in regard to the highest emotions So that a cultivated japanese never even speaks of his wife and family, or hints of his fondness for theher But it is a question with me whether it cannot be, and has not been, developed to excess I think we have filled the whole universe with an ideal of wolories exist for us only in an infinity of passional pantheish the beauty of wos of birds, undulations of hills, e, hter of streas reedness of oaks and the gris as masculine True, we have visions of Nature as hty contrasts But how enore is a language of gender,--in which I think the feht the ests the fes, too, remind us of what is not masculine, because ”far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of _her_”