KUMAMOTO, April, 1892.
DEAR HENDRICK,--Just had a long and delightful letter from you, and
Mallock's book. I hate the Jesuit; but he has a particular cleverness
of his own indeed. I hate him first because he is insincere, as
you suggest; then I hate him because he is morbid, with a priestly
morbidness--sickly, cynical, unhealthy. I like Kipling's morbidness,
which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the teeth of
God and hell and nature,--but the other--no! This book is not free from
the usual faults. It is like Paul Bourget boiled into thin soup, and
flavoured with a dash of M. de Camors. The Markham girl was certainly
Feuillet's imagination; but she is excellently done. Really, I don't
know;--I asked myself: "If it was I?" ... And conscience answered: "If
it was _you_, in spite of love and duty and honour and hellfire staring
you in the face you would have gone after her,--and tried to console
yourself by considering the Law of Attraction of Bodies and Souls in
the incomprehensible cosmical order of things, which is older than the
gods." And I was very much inclined to demur; but conscience repeated:
"Oh! don't be such a liar and quibbler;--you know you would! That was
the only part of the book you really liked. Your ancestors were not
religious people: you lack constitutional morality. That's why you are
poor, and unsuccessful, and void of mental balance, and an exile in
Japan. You know you cannot be happy in an English moral community. You
are a fraud--a vile Latin--a vicious French-hearted scalawag."
And I could not say anything, because what conscience observed was
true--to a considerable extent. "_Vive le monde antique!_" ...
I have been thinking a heap, because of being much alone. (The Japanese
do not understand Western thought at all--at least not its emotional
side. Therefore devour time and devour thought even while they stimulate
it.) ...
Now about these Shadows. Yes, there are forces about one,--vague,
working soundlessly, imperceptibly, softening one as the action of air
softens certain surfaces of rock while hardening others. The magnetism
of another faith about you necessarily polarizes that loose-quivering
needle of desire in a man that seeks source of attraction in spite of
synthetic philosophy. The general belief in an infinite past and future
interpenetrates one somehow. When you find children who do wrong are
always warned, "Ah! your future birth will be unhappy;" when you find
two lovers drinking death together, and leaving behind them letters
saying, "This is the influence of our last birth, when we broke our
promise to become husband and wife;" and last, but not least, when
some loving woman murmurs, laughingly: "In the last life thou wert a
woman and I a man, and I loved thee much; but thou didst not love me at
all,"--you begin to doubt if you do not really believe like everybody
else.
About the training of the senses. The idea is admirable, but _alas!_--a
very clever Frenchman five years ago, in the _Revue Politique et
Littéraire_, almost exhausted it. He represented a man who had
cultivated his eye so that he could see the bacteria in the air, and the
grain of metals,--also being able to adjust his eyes to distance. He had
trained his ear so as to hear all sounds of growth and decomposition. He
had trained his nose to smell all substances supposed to have no smell.
He made a diagram of the five senses thus:--