DEAR HENDRICK,--What you wrote about the charming person "_flirting_
with her maternal instincts" is delicious. I recognized the portrait in
a most fantastic past experience,--but of that anon. The thought sent me
off into a reverie about--adulteration.
There is a philosophy about adulteration I don't know much about. I
have not sufficiently learned the main facts about the practical and
utilitarian side of adulteration,--though I read the "petit dictionnaire
des falsifications," and other things. However, let's try. Most of what
we sell now is adulteration. We used to feel angry, when I was a boy,
at the mere thought that leather-composition should be sold for genuine
leather,--shoddy for wool,--cotton mixed with silk for pure silk,
etc. We wanted our spoons to be genuine silver, and our claret quite
trustworthy. Since then we have had to resign ourselves to margarine,
glucose, and other products which have become vast staples of commerce.
In some cases the genuine has been altogether supplanted by the false;
and the false has been universally accepted with full knowledge of its
origin. There have been advantages enormous to industry and manufacture,
of course; and the public health has not been ruined, according to
prediction. On the contrary it has been improving, and the nervous
system developing.
Now may not the same thing be going on in our morals? Or rather, must
it not go on? We are substituting the sham for the real. It is very
sorrowful and excites awful surmises; but nevertheless the sham seems to
do very well. The trouble with the original article was its cost and its
enormous solidity. It was not malleable. It resisted pressure. It was
not adapted at all to the new life of cities and science. For example,
absolute veracity interfered with business,--absolute love became a
nuisance, took up too much space, and proved too incompressible. Just
as we have become too sensitive to bear the rawness of pure colour, so
have we become too sensitive to bear the rawness of pure affection.
We consider persons vulgar who wear blood-red, grass-green, burning
yellows and blues--persons of undeveloped feeling and taste. So also
we begin to think people vulgar who are prone to live by any simple
emotions. We hold them undeveloped. We don't want the real thing. No:
we want shades, tones,--imperceptible tones, ethereal shades. Even in
books the raw emotion has become distasteful, savage. Pure passion is
penny-theatrical. Isn't all this a suggestion of fact? And isn't the
fact founded upon necessary physiological changes? Existing life is too
complex for pure emotions. We want mixed tonics,--delicately flavoured
and tinted.
All of which means that the primal sources of life are becoming
forgotten. Love, honour, idealism, etc., these can no longer be supreme
or absorbing motives. They interfere with more serious necessities,
and with pleasure. We have first to learn how to live inside the
eight-day clock of modern life without getting caught in the cogs. This
learned,--and it is no easy lesson,--we may venture to indulge in some
falsifications of emotion, some shot-silk colours of love. Such seems
to me the drift. The most serious necessity of life is not to take the
moral side of it seriously. We must play with it, as with an _hetaira_.
The genuine is only good for the agricultural districts.
And is this progress in a durable sense, or morbidness in evolution?
Really I am not sure.
Ever affectionately,
LAFCADIO HEARN.