KUMAMOTO, November, 1893.
DEAR HENDRICK,--I have been waiting several weeks to tell you of an
event which occurred later than I expected. Last night my child was
born,--a very strong boy, with large black eyes; he looks more like a
Japanese, however, than like a foreign boy. He has my nose, but his
mother's features in some other respects, curiously blended with mine.
There is no fault with him; and the physicians say, from the form of
his little bones, that he promises to become very tall. A cross between
European and Japanese is nearly always an improvement when both parents
are in good condition; and happily the old military caste to which
my wife belongs is a strong one. She is quite well.--Still, I had
my anxiety, and the new experience brought to me for a moment, with
extraordinary force, the knowledge of how sacred and terrible a thing
maternity is, and how even religion cannot hedge it about sufficiently
with protection. Then I thought with astonishment of the possibility
that men could be cruel to women who bore their children; and the world
seemed very dark for a moment. When it was all over, I confess I felt
very humble and grateful to the Unknowable Power which had treated us so
kindly,--and I said a little prayer of thanks, feeling quite sure it was
not foolish to do so.
If ever you become a father, I think the strangest and strongest
sensation of your life will be hearing for the first time the thin
cry of your own child. For a moment you have the strange feeling
of being double; but there is something more, quite impossible to
analyze--perhaps the echo in a man's heart of all the sensations felt
by all the fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the
past. It is a very tender, but also a very ghostly feeling.
Now the kind dull veil that Nature keeps during most of a life stretched
between it and such extraordinary glimpses of the Unknown, is drawn
again. The world is the same nearly as before; and I can plan. The
little man will wear sandals and dress like a Japanese, and become a
good little Buddhist if he lives long enough. He will not have to go to
church, and listen to stupid sermons, and be perpetually tormented by
absurd conventions. He will have what I never had as a child,--natural
physical freedom.
Your two late letters were full of interest and beauty, and you are
getting most surprising glimpses of life. I have long had in my mind the
idea of a chapter on "Morbid Individuality"--taking issue with Lowell's
position in "The Soul of the Far East." Instances like those you have
cited are very telling as proofs. The story of the father also is
wonderful--absolutely wonderful,--a beautiful surprise of human nature.
What also much impressed me in your letter was the feeling of sadness
the spectacle of the great Exposition gave you. But I scarcely think
it was due to any reminiscences of boyhood--not simply because of its
being certainly a feeling infinitely too complex to have sprung out of a
single relative experience in the past (your confession of inability to
analyze it, and the statement of others who had the same feeling, would
show that),--but also because, if you reflect on other experiences of a
totally different kind, you will find they give the same sensation. The
first sight of a colossal range of mountains; the awful beauty of a peak
like Chimborazo or Fuji; the majesty of an enormous river; the vision
of the sea in speaking motion; and, among human spectacles, a military
sight, such as the passing-by of a corps of fifty thousand men, will
give also a feeling of sadness. You will feel something like it standing
in the choir of the Cathedral of Cologne; and you will feel something
like it while watching in the night, from some mighty railroad centre,
the rushing of glimmering trains,--bearing away human lives to unknown
destinies beyond the darkness.
Probably, as Schopenhauer said, the vision of mountains has the effect
of producing sadness, because the sense of their antiquity awakens
sudden recognition of the shortness of human life. But I do not think it
is a mere individual feeling. It is a feeling we share with countless
dead who live in us, and who saw the same mountains,--perhaps felt
the same way. Besides, there should be a religious ancestral feeling
there--since mountains have ever been the abode of gods, and the
earliest places of worship and of burial. And I think there is. You do
not laugh when you look at mountains--nor when you look at the sea.
What effect does the sudden sight of an extraordinarily beautiful
person have upon you? I mean the very _first_. Is it not an effect of
sadness? Analyze it; and perhaps you will find yourself involuntarily
thinking of _death_.
What has the effect of any great beauty--of art, or poetry or
utterance--no matter what the subject? Is it cheerful? No, it is very
sad. But why? Perhaps partly because of the consciousness of the
_exceptional_ character of that beauty,--therefore the sudden contrast
between the tender dream-world of art and goodness, and the hideous
goblin realities of the world we know. At all events the sadness is
certainly the ancient sadness,--the sadness of life, which must, for
reasons we cannot learn, begin and end with an agony.
Now at the Exposition you had all the elements for what Clifford would
call a "cosmic emotion" of sadness. Vastness, which forced the knowledge
of individual weakness; beauty, compelling the memory of impermanency;
force, suggesting weakness also; and prodigious effort,--calling for the
largest possible exertion of human sympathy, and love, and pity, and
sorrow. That you should feel like crying then, does you honour: that is
the tribute of all that is noblest in you to the eternal Religion of
Human Suffering.
Dear H., I have not slept last night: I am going to rest a
little;--good-bye for a short time, with love to you.