Volume II Part 18 (2/2)
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
KOBE, January, 1895
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--To-day is a spring day and I can add a little to htens upjust now about the difference between the japanese _hyakusho_ and the English irl from Imaichi--who cannot read or write--saw you at kumamoto and said words to this effect: ”He speaks japanese like a greatof the intellectual and moral side of you had reached and touched her simple mind The other day a merchant said of you: ”Chamberlain--Oh, yes Met hiood game of whist!” There 's appreciation for you Which is the best soul of the two--irl's or that merchant's?
A merchant, however, has inspired me with the idea of a sketch, to be entitled ”His Josses”!
On the other hand it strikes me that in another twenty years, or perhaps thirty, after a brief artificial expansion, all the ports will shrink
The foreign coencies A systeurated and ners who can be driven away After the war there will be a strong anti-foreign reaction--outrages--police-repressions--temporary stillness and peace: then a new crusade Life will be made wretched for Occidentals--in business--just as it is being made in the schools--by all sorts of little tricky plans which cannot be brought under law-provisions, or even so defined as to appear to justify resentenious as they are in matters of etiquette and forly side to us--after a manner unexpected, but irresistible
The future looks worse than black As for me, I am in a perpetual quandary I suppose I'll have to travel West,--and consoleintervals
Well, there's no use in worrying--one must face the music,
I am sorry your eyes are weak, too What the devil of a trouble physical trouble is!--a dead weight check on will! Still, you have good luck in other ways, and after all, eye-trouble is only a warning in both our cases
Ever truly, LAFCADIO HEARN
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
KOBE, February, 1895
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I had mailed you the American letter before your own most kind enclosure came, with the note from Makino Of course this is beyond thanks,--and I can't say very much about it Since then I received from you also Lowell's six papers on Mars,--which I have read, and return by this mail,--and your friendly lines froested in the Ata about matters
There would be special conditions in New Orleans, on the paper of which I was ten years a staff-writer I should have to work only a couple of hours a day inand travel There are risks, too,--yellow fever, lawlessness, and personal enemies But to leave japan noould, of course, be like tearing one's self in two,--and I am not sure but the ultimate nervous result would destroy ine, will be to ask o The great thing for me is not to worry: worry and literary ill not harmonize The work always betrays the strain afterward
You say my friend writes nicely He is about the most lovable ht, with a singular face He is so exactly an ideal Mephistopheles that he would never get his photograph taken The face does not altogether belie the character,--but the inal
It never offends The real Mephistopheles appears only when there are ugly obstacles to overcome Then the diabolical keenness hichmoves by which a plot is checkmated, or made a net for the plotter himself, usually startle people He is a man of immense force--it takes such a one to rule in that corace or consideration I always loved hih of his company for estive--are they not? Just how much of the theories and the discoveries were Lowell's very own, I can't s to be thankful for You know the physiological side of his psychology in ”Occult japan” is no inal than the ”Miscellany” of a medical weekly
By the way, I e 293,--when he says that the absence of the belief in possession by other living men is a proof of the absence of personality in japan As a matter of fact there is no such absence I alone know of three different forms of such belief--and know that one is extreument built upon the supposed absence of that belief vanishes into nothingness!
As Huxley says, that oes about the world ”unlabelled” is sure to be punished for it So I can't help thinking that I ought to have a label Fancy theround that ”Neither of us are Christians” The Ama-terasu-Omi-kami business first aroused my suspicions, but the phrase itself was so raw!
Couno; Compania de dos 2 Compania de Dios; Compania de tres 3 Compania es (but never for me); Compania de cuatro 4 Coht 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 ards,
LAFCADIO HEARN
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
KOBE, February, 1895