KŌBE, February, 1895.
DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I never liked any letter I got from you more
than the last--which brings us closer together. I suppose I have often
misread you--being more supersensitive than I ought to be,--and also
finding certain of my best friends so differently soul-toned that I am
often at a loss to understand hows and whys. But it is curious that we
are absolutely at one, after all, on sociological questions, as your
letter shows. Undoubtedly the "coming slavery," predicted by Spencer,
will come upon us. A democracy more brutal than any Spartan oligarchy
will control life. Men may not be obliged to eat at a public table;
but every item of their existence will be regulated by law. The world
will be sickened for all time of democracy as now preached. The future
tyranny will be worse than any of old,--for it will be a régime of moral
rather than physical pain, and there will be no refuge from it--except
among savages. But, for all that, the people are good. They will be
trapped through their ignorance, and held in slavery by their ignorance;
and made, I suppose, in the eternal order, to develop a still higher
goodness before they can reach freedom again.
I believe there is no point of your letter in which we are not
thoroughly at accord. I have also been inclined to many schools of
belief in these matters: I have been at heart everything by turns. It
is like the history of one's religious experiences. And just as when,
after emancipating one's self from the last mesh of the net of creeds,
one sees for the first time the value-social and meaning of all, and
the moral worth of many,--so in sociological questions, it is by
emancipation from faiths in politics that one learns what lies behind
all politics,--the necessity of the Conservative vs. the Radical, of the
pleb. vs. the aristo. Then, if sympathetic with popular needs one still
recognizes the æsthetic and moral value of ranks and orders; or, if
belonging to the latter, one learns also to understand that the great,
good, unhappy, moral, immoral, vicious, virtuous people are the real
soil of all future hope,--the field of the divine in Man.
But for all that, when conditions jar on me, I sometimes grumble and see
only evil. What matter? I never look for it as a study. My work--though
"no great shakes"--must show you that. At the end of all experiences,
bitter and pleasant, I try to sum up good only.
What I said about the Germans you may not have understood. I did
not explain. There is, I think, a particular German characteristic
which has its charm. Accustomed for generations to a communal form
of life--totally different from that of the English--there has been
developed among them a certain spirit of tolerance and a social
inclination essentially German. Also the poverty of their country has
nourished a tendency to sobriety of life, while the causes developing
their educational system on a wonderful level of economy have brought
the race, I believe, to a higher general plane than others. I don't
mean that the top-shoots are higher than French or English; but I think
the middle growth educationally is. At all events a German community in
America or in Japan, while it remains German--has a peculiar charm--an
independence of conventions, as distinguished from the religious and
social codes,--and an exterior affability,--quite different from the
individualism of other communities. Perhaps, however, the friendship
never goes quite as deep as in those isolated natures so much harder to
win.
The essay by Spencer you will find in a volume sent you by mail, and
sent to me by my American friend. It did not appear in the old editions.
Perhaps I may try the feat some day of a Japanese study on those
lines,--though I must acknowledge that I now perceive several of my
views entirely wrong. I also perceive how closely Lowell reached the
neighbourhood of truth without being able, nevertheless, (or willing?)
to actually touch it. My conclusion is that the charm of Japanese life
is largely the charm of childhood, and that the most beautiful of all
race childhoods is passing into an adolescence which threatens to prove
repulsive. Perhaps the manhood may redeem all,--as with English "bad
boys" it often does.
I fear I can scarcely finish "Occult Japan," and that I praised it
too much in my late letter, after hasty examination. It strikes me
only as a mood of the man, an ugly, supercilious one, verging on the
wickedness of a wish to hurt. When my eyes improve, I should like better
to see his work on Mars. I don't wish to say that my work is as good as
Lowell's "Soul of the Far East;" but it is a curious fact that in at
least a majority of the favourable criticisms I have been spoken of as
far more successful than Lowell. Why? Certainly not because I am his
equal, either as a thinker or an observer. The reason is simply that
the world considers the sympathetic mood more just than the analytical
or critical. And except when the critic is a giant like Spencer or
his peers,--I fear the merely critical mood will always be blind to
the most vital side of any human question. For the more vital side is
feeling,--not reason. This, indeed, Spencer showed long ago. But there
was in the "Soul of the Far East" an exquisite approach to playful
tenderness--utterly banished from "Occult Japan."
Ever yours,
LAFCADIO HEARN.