November, 1892.
DEAR OLD FELLOW,-- ... What a beastly nightmare that woman who
married the preacher! High-pressure civilization only produces these
types.--But, Lord! what is to be the end?... The race will still be
to the mentally strong as well as to the physically strong. But the
women fit for fertile maternity, and equally fit to discuss the fourth
dimension of space, are yet rare,--and apt to be a little terrible. The
cost of intellectual race-expansion is more terrible,--is frightful; and
then the expansion cannot _ever_ become universal. The many must profit
by the few. To make 1 of the few, there must be, I suppose, at least
111,111 of such monstrosities created as that one you wrote of.
Isn't the hunger for the eternal feminine much like the other
hunger?--to be completely exorcised in the same way. Marriage seems
to me the certain destruction of all that emotion and suffering,--so
that one afterwards looks back at the old times with wonder. One
cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into the
friendship of marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see the
dangerous sea-currents, running like violet bands beyond you out of
sight. It seems to me (though I'm a poor judge of such matters) that it
doesn't make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife--unless he
marries for society. The less intellectual, the more lovable: so long as
there is neither coarseness nor foolishness. For intellectual converse a
man _can't_ have really with women: womanhood is antagonistic to it. And
emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind as to the mind of
Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the god come equally near
to the eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilization is
really a terrible problem: there are so _many_ questions involved.
Oh!--_you_ talk of being without intellectual companionship! O ye Eight
Hundred Myriads of Gods! What would you do if you were me. Lo! the
illusion is gone!--Japan in Kyūshū is like Europe;--except I have
no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties
of language, render it impossible for an _educated_ Japanese to find
pleasure in the society of a European. Here is an astounding fact. The
Japanese child is as close to you as the European child--perhaps closer
and sweeter, because infinitely more natural and naturally refined.
Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated, the _further you push
him_ from you. Why? Because there the race-antipodalism shows itself.
As the Oriental thinks naturally to the left where we think to the
right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in
the opposite direction from you. Finis sweetness, sympathy, friendship.
Now, my scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but
men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers never speak to me
at all. I go to the college (two miles away) by jinrikisha and return
after class,--always alone, no mental company but books. But at home
everything is sweet.
At the college there is always a recess of half an hour at noon, for
dining. I do not dine, but climb the hill behind the college. There
is a grey old cemetery, where "the rude forefathers of the hamlet
sleep." From between the tombs I can look down on the Dai Go Kōtō
Chūgakkō, with its huge modern brick buildings and its tumultuous
life, as in a bird's-eye view. I am only there never alone. For
Buddha sits beside me, and also looks down upon the college through
his half-closed eyelids of stone. There is moss on his nose and his
hands,--moss on his back, of course! And I always say to him: "O Master,
what do you think of all this?--is it not vanity? There is no faith
there, no creed, no thought of the past life nor of the future life, nor
of Nirvana,--only chemistry and cube-geometry and trigonometry,--and the
most damnable 'English language.'" He never answers me; but he looks
very sad,--smiles just like one who has received an injury which he
cannot return,--and you know that is the most pathetic of all smiles.
And the snakes twist before my feet as I descend to the sound of the
bell.--There is my only companion for you! but I like him better than
those who look like him waiting for me in the classroom. Ever with best
regards,