KUMAMOTO, April, 1893.
DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... You never wrote a more wonderful letter than that
last letter full of penetrating things. Now one of my shortcomings is
a total ignorance of practical worldly wisdom;--for instance, I could
not sit down and talk to a man in polite enigmas which both of us would
understand, at all. All that world of business is to me a mystery and
a marvel incomprehensible. Moreover, it is the revelation of mental
powers of a very subtle order, as much beyond me as mathematics,--so
that I cannot but respect the forces manifested, even if I deplore the
directions in which they are sometimes exercised. Your sketch of the two
men, and the interview, and the psychological relations was perfectly
delicious,--and like nearly everything you write to me, gave me the
pleasure of a novel sensation....
Your criticism about ----'s criticism was not exactly what I thought you
might make:--it _is_ true that we like to be thought, and to believe
ourselves, capable of doing vast harm, and credit ourselves more for our
goodness perhaps on account of that belief. But I don't agree with you
in thinking the remark uncomplimentary. I think it was true, and in the
sense I take it, beautiful. Ask yourself could you really do anything
you knew to be terribly cruel under any personal provocation,--at
least after the first burst of sudden anger was over? And you will
find you _could not_. Any nature sincerely sympathetic--with a complex
nerve-system--cannot inflict pain without receiving at least as much,
if not more pain than it gives. I believe you could kill a man, under
just provocation; but that is not bad, or cruel--indeed, it might be
a duty. The terrible men are the men who do everything in cold blood,
icily, with calculation, infinite patience, and infinite pleasure. But
the capacity to be thus dangerous means also a low development of those
qualities which give sweetness to character and amiability to life,--and
chivalry to a man's soul.
Now here is the very immoral side of Western civilization. Being wholly
aggressive and selfish, the hard, cold qualities of character are
being prodigiously developed by it. The emotional qualities, you might
suggest, are also indirectly developed by the suffering the others
inflict;--there is action and reaction. Yes, that is true. But the
terrible men--the men of the type of that manager--represent not only
a constantly increasing class, but a leading one--the class whose name
is Power. Now Power multiplies. In wealth and luxury multiplication
is rapid and facile. They are less fertile comparatively than other
classes; but the cost of their individuality is infinitely greater,
and one type can outlive, outwork, outplan a hundred of the emotional
sort,--as a general rule. The ultimate tendency is to settle all power
in the hands of those without moral scruple. It may take another few
centuries to do this; but the tendency is obvious, and the danger is
steadily growing. I think the West can never become as moral as the
Orient. But it may become infinitely more wicked.
This is one way of seeing the matter. Another I wrote you about in my
last letter,--the sexual question in the West,--something never dreamed
of in the East. What must be the ultimate results of this Western
worship of the Eternal Feminine? Must not one be, the contempt of old
age, and universal irreverence for things the most naturally deserving
of reverence? Already, in the West, the Family has almost ceased to
exist.
To an Oriental it seems utterly monstrous that grown-up children should
not live with their father, mother, and grandparents, and support and
love them more than their own children, wives, or husbands. It seems to
him sheer wickedness that a man should not love his mother-in-law,--or
that he should love his own wife even half as well as his own father or
mother. Our whole existence seems to him disgustingly immoral. He would
deem worthy of death the man who wrote--
"He stood on his head on the wild seashore,
And joy was the cause of the act;--
For he felt, as he never had felt before,
Insanely glad, in fact.
And why? Because on that selfsame day
His mother-in-law had sailed
To a tropical climate, far away,
_Where tigers and snakes prevailed_."
He first most loves his father,--then his mother,--then his
father-in-law and mother-in-law,--then his children,--and lastly, his
wife. His wife is not of the family proper,--a stranger,--not of the
blood of the ancestors,--how can he love her like his own parents!
Now I half suspect the Oriental is right.
To him the people of the West with their novels and poems about love
seem a race of very lascivious people. If indeed he should think more
kindly of them at all, it would be through pity,--as a race of sexually
starved beings, frantic with nymphomania and all forms of erotomania,
through refusal to obey the laws of nature. "They talk about their
wives!--they write novels about their lusts!--they do not support
their parents!--they do not obey their mothers-in-law! Truly they are
savages!" Now they write love-stories in Japan. But who are the women
of these love-stories? Dancing-girls. "If one must write stories about
the passion of sex, let him at least not write such things about wives
and daughters of honest men--let him write about whores! A whore's
business is to excite passion. That of a pure woman is to quench it.
What horribly immoral people the Western people are!"
--Don Juan is the imagination of the West. No Japanese Don Juan--no
Chinese Don Juan--ever existed or could exist. He is a common type at
home. But the Orient rejoices also in exemption from one of the most
terrible creations of Western life;--no Oriental is haunted by "the
Woman thou shalt never know."
What a curse and a delusion is that beautiful spectre! How many lives
she makes desolate! How many crimes does she inspire, "the Woman thou
shalt never know!"--the impossible ideal, not of love, but of artistic
passion, pursued by warm hearts from youth till age, always in vain.
As her pursuer grows more old, she becomes ever more young and fair.
He waits for her through the years,--waits till his hair is grey.
Then,--wifeless, childless, blasé, ennuyé, cynical, misanthropic,--he
looks in the glass and finds that he has been cheated out of youth and
life. But does he give up the chase? No!--the hair of Lilith--just
one--has been twisted round his heart,--an ever-tightening fine
spider-line of gold. And he sees her smile just ere he passes into the
Eternal darkness.
Then again, our social morals! We never in the West talk to people of
their duties. Do orators make speeches about duties? Do any, except
priests, talk about social duties? But what do we talk to the people
about? We talk to them about their _rights_,--"by G--d!" Always,
incessantly, _ad nauseam_, about their _rights_. Now to talk to people
who know nothing of social science, of political economy, of ethical
ideas in their relation to eternal truths,--to talk to such people
about their _rights_, is like giving a new-born baby a razor to play
with. Or putting a loaded revolver in the hands of a mischievous child.
Or inviting a crowd of urchins to make a bonfire in the immediate
vicinity of ten thousand barrels of gunpowder. And the Oriental knows
this. (Wherefore in China it was a law that he who should say or invent
anything new should be put to death,--an extreme view of the necessities
of the case, but not much more extreme than our own philistinism.)
The Japanese of the new school do not, however, keep to the Chinese
wisdom. They show evidence now of a desire to put to death those who
say anything older than yesterday. They are becoming infected with the
Western moral poison. They are beginning to love their wives more than
their fathers and mothers;--it is much cheaper....
By the way, I am in a world of new sensations. My first child will be
born, I expect, about September next. The rest of my family have come
from Matsue,--father-in-law, father's father also, a nice old man of 84.
We are now all together. There is universal joy because of the birth
in prospect. And I am accused of not seeming joyful enough. I am not
sorry. But I hope my little one will never have to face life in the
West, but may always dwell in a Buddhist atmosphere.
Ever most faithfully,
LAFCADIO HEARN.