[Illustration]
DEAR NISHIDA,--It gave me much pleasure to get your last
kind letter. There was much depth in your statement of the present
instability being consequent upon the stagnation of three hundred
years. As to the consequence, however, only two theories are possible.
The instability means--however it end--disintegration. Is the
disintegration to be permanent?--or is there to be a re-integration?
That is what nobody can say. There is this, however. Usually a movement
of disintegration represents something like this line,--the undulations
signifying waves of reaction. This movement is downward, and ends in
ruin. However, so far, the undulations in Japan have been, I think, of
a very different character,--something like this:--which would mean
restoration of national solidity upon a much higher plane than before.
The doubt is whether a much larger movement of disintegration is not
going on,--whose undulations are too large to be seen in a space of
thirty years.
[Illustration]
You have noticed that under all the surface waves of a sea, far vaster
waves move--too large to be seen. They are only _felt_--upon _long_
voyages.
Mr. Senke has sent me a letter which I think is the most wonderfully
kind and gracious letter anybody ever received in this whole world, and
how to answer it at all, I don't know. He has also promised to send some
souvenir; I am not quite sure what it is: I must _try_ to write him a
nice letter when it comes. But Mr. Senke writes as an Emperor would
write--with a grace for which there is no equivalent in Western speech
at all; and whatever I try to do, it must seem vulgar and common beside
the splendid courtesy of Mr. Senke's style.