But in strange contrast to the methodical faculty thus manifested was
the poetry of a farewell letter, containing such thoughts as these:--
"The eighty-eighth night" [that is, from the festival of the Setsubun]
"having passed like a dream, ice changed itself into clear drops, and
snow gave place to rain. Then cherry-blossoms came to please everybody;
but now, poor things! they begin to fall even before the wind touches
them. Again a little while, and the wind will make them fly through the
bright air in the pure spring weather. Yet it may be that the hearts
of those who love me will not be bright, will feel no pleasant spring.
The season of rains will come next, and there will be no joy in their
hearts.... Oh! what shall I do? There has been no moment in which I
have not thought of you.... But all ice, all snow, becomes at last free
water; the incense buds of the kiku will open even in frost. I pray
you, think later about these things.... Even now, for me, is the time
of frost, the time of kiku buds: if only they can blossom, perhaps
I shall please you much. Placed in this world of sorrow, but not to
stay, is the destiny of all. I beseech you, think me not unfilial; say
to none that you have lost me, that I have passed into the darkness.
Bather wait and hope for the fortunate time that shall come."
*
The editor of the pamphlet betrayed rather too much of the Oriental
manner of judging woman, even while showering generous praise upon
one typical woman. In a letter to the authorities Yuko had spoken of a
family claim, and this was criticised as a feminine weakness. She had,
indeed, achieved the extinction of personal selfishness, but she had
been "very foolish" to speak about her family. In some other ways the
book was disappointing. Under the raw, strong light of its commonplace
revelations, my little sketch, "Yuko," written in 1894, seemed for the
moment much too romantic. And yet the real poetry of the event remained
unlessened,--the pure ideal that impelled a girl to take her own life
merely to give proof of the love and loyalty of a nation. No small,
mean, dry facts could ever belittle that large fact.
The sacrifice had stirred the feelings of the nation much more than it
had touched my own. Thousands of photographs of Yuko and thousands of
copies of the little book about her were sold. Multitudes visited her
tomb and made offerings there, and gazed with tender reverence at the
relics in Makkeiji; and all this, I thought, for the best of reasons.
If commonplace facts are repellent to what we are pleased, in the
West, to call "refined feeling," it is proof that the refinement is
factitious and the feeling shallow. To the Japanese, who recognize that
the truth of beauty belongs to the inner being, commonplace details
are precious: they help to accentuate and verify the conception of a
heroism. Those poor blood-stained trifles--the coarse honest robes
and girdle, the little cheap purse, the memoranda of a visit to the
pawnbroker, the glimpses of plain, humble, every-day humanity shown
by the letters and the photographs and the infinitesimal precision of
police records--all serve, like so much ocular evidence, to perfect
the generous comprehension of the feeling that made the fact. Had Yuko
been the most beautiful person in Japan, and her people of the highest
rank, the meaning of her sacrifice would have been far less intimately
felt. In actual life, as a general rule, it is the common, not the
uncommon person who does noble things; and the people, seeing best, by
the aid of ordinary facts, what is heroic in one of their own class,
feel themselves honored. Many of us in the West will have to learn our
ethics over again from the common people. Our cultivated classes have
lived so long in an atmosphere of false idealism, mere conventional
humbug, that the real, warm, honest human emotions seem to them vulgar;
and the natural and inevitable punishment is inability to see, to hear,
to feel, and to think. There is more truth in the little verse poor
Yuko wrote on the back of her mirror than in most of our conventional
idealism:--
"_By one keeping the heart free from stain, virtue and right and wrong
are seen clearly as forms in a mirror._"