DEAR PROFESSOR CHAMBERLAIN,--Your welcome letter has just reached me,
on the eve of a trip to Kizuki, and--unless extraordinary circumstances
prevent--Oki islands. My guest has departed. He was so petted and made
much of here, that I could not help regretting you also would not come.
I think I could make you comfortable here,--even in regard to diet,--at
any time when you could make the trip; and, as far as the people go,
they would embarrass you with kindness. Your name here is--well, more
than you would wish it to be.
Your last delightful letter I did not fully answer in my last, being
hurried. What you said about the influence of health or sickness
on the spiritual life of a man went straight to my heart. I have
found, as you have done, that the possessor of pure horse-health
never seems to have an idea of the "half-lights." It is impossible
to see the psychical undercurrents of human existence without that
self-separation from the purely physical part of being, which severe
sickness gives--like a revelation. One in good health, who has never
been obliged to separate his immaterial self from his material self,
always will imagine that he understands much which, even recorded in
words, cannot be understood at all without sharp experience. We are all
living two lives,--but the revelation of the first seems only to come
by accident. There is an essay worth reading, entitled "Sickness is
Health,"--dealing with the physical results of sickness only; but there
is a much larger psychological truth in the title than the author of
it, whose name I forget, ever dreamed of. All the history of asceticism
and self-suppression as a religion, appears to me founded upon a vague,
blundering, intuitive recognition of the terrible and glorious fact,
that we can reach the highest life only through that self-separation
which the experiences of illness, that is, the knowledge of physical
weakness, brings; perfect health always involves the domination of
the spiritual by the physical--at least in the present state of human
evolution.
Perhaps it will interest you to know the effect of Japanese life upon
your little friend after the experiences of a year and a half. At first,
the sense of existence here is like that of escaping from an almost
unbearable atmospheric pressure into a rarefied, highly oxygenated
medium. That feeling continues: in Japan the law of life is not as
with us,--that each one strives to expand his own individuality at
the expense of his neighbour's. But on the other hand, how much one
loses! Never a fine inspiration, a deep emotion, a profound joy or a
profound pain--never a thrill, or, as the French say so much better
than we, a _frisson_. So literary work is dry, bony, hard, dead work. I
have confined myself strictly to the most emotional phases of Japanese
life,--popular religion and popular imagination, and yet I can find
nothing like what I would get at once in any Latin country, a strong
emotional thrill. Whether it is that the difference in our ancestral
history renders what we call soul-sympathy almost impossible, or whether
it is that the Japanese are psychically smaller than we, I cannot
venture to decide--I hope the former. But the experience of all thinking
persons with whom I have had a chance to speak seems to be the same.
But how sweet the Japanese woman is!--all the possibilities of the race
for goodness seem to be concentrated in her. It shakes one's faith in
some Occidental doctrines. If this be the result of suppression and
oppression,--then these are not altogether bad. On the other hand, how
diamond-hard the character of the American woman becomes under the
idolatry of which she is the subject. In the eternal order of things
which is the highest being,--the childish, confiding, sweet Japanese
girl,--or the superb, calculating, penetrating Occidental Circe of our
more artificial society, with her enormous power for evil, and her
limited capacity for good? Viscount Torio's idea haunts me more and
more;--I think there are very formidable truths in his observations
about Western sociology. And the question comes: "In order to comprehend
the highest good, is it necessary that we must first learn the largest
power of evil?" For the one may be the Shadow of the other.
I am very much disappointed with Rein. I got much more information
about my own particular line of study from your "Things Japanese" than
from Rein. Rein himself confesses, after seven or eight years' labour,
that he has only been able to make "a patchwork"! What, then, can a man
like myself hope to do,--without scientific knowledge, and without any
hope of even acquiring the language of the country so as to read even
a newspaper? Really it seems to me almost an impertinence on my part
to try to write anything about Japan at all, and the only fact which
gives me courage is that there exists no book especially devoted to the
subject I hope to consider.
The deity of Mionoseki is called always by the people Ebisu, or
Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami;--in the guide the deity is said to be Hiruko,
who, I believe, has been identified by Shintō commentators with
Hiruko, as I find in the article on the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, in
the Asiatic Transactions. But I am not sure what to say about Hiruko
being the deity of Mio Jinja, as a general statement. My friends say
that only a Shintō priest can decide, and I am going to see one.
Most truly,
LAFCADIO HEARN.