KUMAMOTO, April, 1893.
DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... I hear rarely from America, and have no definite
news from Boston up to date. They send me a paper--the Sunday edition,
full of poetry about love, woodcuts of beauties of fashion, and all
sorts of chatter about women and new styles of undergarments. To-day,
after three years in the most Eastern East, when I look at that paper,
I can hardly believe my eyes. The East has opened my eyes. How affected
the whole thing seems! Yet it never seemed so to me before. My students
say to me, "Dear Teacher, why are your English novels all filled with
nonsense about love and women?--we do not like such things." Then I
tell them partly why. "You must know, my dear young gentlemen, that in
England and America, marriage is a most important matter,--though it is
something you never even speak about in Japan. For in Japan, it is as
easy to get married as it is to eat a bowl of rice. But for educated
young men in the West, it is very difficult and dangerous to marry. It
is necessary to be rich to marry well,--or to be, at least, what _you_
would call rich. And the struggle for life is very bitter and very
terrible--so bitter and terrible that you cannot possibly imagine what
it means. It is hard to live at all,--made harder to marry. Therefore
the whole object of life is to succeed _in order to get married_. And
the parents have nothing to do with the matter, as in Japan; the young
man must please the girl, and must win her away from all other young
men who want to get her. That is why the English and others write all
that stuff about love and beauty and marriage, and why everybody buys
those books and laughs or weeps over them--though to you they are simply
disgusting."
But that was not all the truth. The whole truth is always suggested to
me by the Sunday paper. We live in the musky atmosphere of desire in
the West;--an erotic perfume emanates from all that artificial life of
ours;--we keep the senses perpetually stimulated with a million ideas
of the eternal feminine; and our very language reflects the strain. The
Western civilization is using all its arts, its sciences, its philosophy
in stimulating and exaggerating and exacerbating the thought of sex. An
Oriental would almost faint with astonishment and shame to see a Western
ballet. He would scream at the sight of a French nude. He would be
scandalized by a Greek statue. He would rightly and instantly estimate
all this as being exactly what it is,--artificial stimulus of dangerous
senses. The whole West is steeped in it. It now seems, even to me,
almost disgusting.
Yet what does it mean? Certainly it pollutes literature, creates and
fosters a hundred vices, accentuates the misery of those devoted by the
law of life as the victims of lust. It turns art from Nature to sex.
It cultivates one æsthetic faculty at the expense of all the rest. And
yet--perhaps its working is divine behind all that veil of vulgarity and
lustfulness. It is cultivating also, beyond any question, a capacity for
tenderness the Orient knows nothing of. Tenderness is not of the Orient
_man_. He is without brutality, but he is also without that immense
reserve force of deep love and forgiving-power which even the rougher
men of the West have. The Oriental is intellectually, rationally capable
of all self-sacrifice and loyalty: he does the noblest and grandest
things without even the ghost of a tender feeling. His feeblest passion
is that of sex, because with him the natural need has never been starved
or exasperated. He marries at sixteen or seventeen perhaps,--is a father
of two or three children at twenty. All that sort of thing for him
belongs to the natural appetites: he would no more talk about his wife
or tell you he had a child born, than he would tell you that his organs
performed their function regularly at 6.30 A.M. He is ashamed
of appearing to have any sexual love at all in public;--and his family
live all their lives in the shadow--do not appear to visitors. Well, his
nature may lose something by this. It loses certainly in capacities that
mean everything for us--tenderness, deep sympathy, a world of sensations
not indeed sexual with us, yet surely developed out of sexualism to no
small extent,--just as the sense of moral beauty developed out of the
sense of physical beauty.