DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--I warned you not to get Gautier's complete works--so
you have been disappointed against my desire. Gautier's own opinion
was adverse to the publication of his complete poems in this shape.
He selected and published separately those which satisfied him, in
the "Emaux et Camées." (I once translated "Les Taches Jaunes,"--isn't
it?--in the other volume; a bit of weird sensualism quite in the
Romantic spirit.) Gautier's work is often uneven. He was a journalist,
and lived by the newspaper. His life's complaint was that he could
never find time for perfect work: the effort merely to live finally
worried him to death during the siege, I think. Still, writing merely
for a newspaper,--in haste,--without a chance to think and polish,--his
feuilletons remain treasures of French literature. (You are very
unjust to his prose; for it is the finest of all French prose.) His
complete works are worth having--they run to about 60 vols., but they
cannot all be had from one publisher. So he has become a subject for
book-collectors. Sainte-Beuve, like Gautier, existed as a journalist. In
France a journalist used to have literary chances. In English-speaking
countries literary work is still outside of the newspapers; and our
would-be littérateurs have therefore a still harder struggle. (See that
article in the _Revue_. No English prose could accomplish those feats of
colour and sensation--delicate sensation the most difficult to produce.
English as an artistic tongue is immeasurably inferior to French.)
"Philip and His Wife" was finished in the October number. I know I sent
all the numbers containing it. Mrs. Deland is a great genius, I think.
Her "Story of a Child" was one of the daintiest bits of psychology I
ever read.
Sorry you deny hereditary sensation. The idea of the experimentalists
that the mind of the newly born child is a _tabula rasa_, and that
all sensations are based on individual experiences, is no longer
recognized--not at least by the evolutional school of psychology, the
only purely scientific school. Spencer especially has denied this idea.
In the life about us we see every day proofs of inherited capacity for
pleasures we know nothing of, and incapacity for pleasures normal to
us and to our whole race. Indeed, I can prove the fact to you at any
time....
Faithfully,
LAFCADIO HEARN.
P. S. I have been out for a walk. As usual the little boys cried "Ijin,"
"Tōjin,"--and, although I don't go out alone, the changed feeling of
even the adult population toward a foreigner wandering through their
streets was strongly visible.
A sadness, such as I never felt before in Japan, came over me. Perhaps
your pencilled comments on the decrease of filial piety, and the
erroneous impressions of national character in "Glimpses," had something
to do with it. I felt, as never before, how utterly dead Old Japan is,
and how ugly New Japan is becoming. I thought how useless to write about
things which have ceased to exist. Only on reaching a little shrine,
filled with popular _ex-voto_,--innocent foolish things,--it seemed to
me something of the old heart was beating still,--but far away from me,
and out of reach. And I thought I would like to be in the old Buddhist
cemetery at Gesshōji, which is in Matsue, in the Land of Izumo,--the
dead are so much better off than the living, and were so much greater.