TŌKYŌ, May, 1897.
DEAR E. H.,--I am still alive in alternations of gloom and sun. I
anticipate now chiefly a national bankruptcy, or a war with Russia to
upset my bank-account. There is a Buddhist text (Saddharma-Pundarika,
chap. III, verse 125):--"The man whom they happen to serve is unwilling
to give them much, and what he gives is soon lost. Such is the fruit
of sinfulness." It would be impossible, I imagine, that I should
escape some future extraordinary experience of calamity. It is simply
ridiculous,--can't help seeing the absurdity of it. Otherwise I have
sorrow.
For my friends have been dying quickly. Some years ago, one said to
me: "You will outlive us: foreigners live longer than Japanese." This
I did not think true, as I know many Japanese over eighty, and the
longevity of the western farmers is sometimes extraordinary--110 years
being not very rare, and 100 plentiful, as examples. But my friend was
doubtless referring to the more delicate classes--the hot-house plants,
conservatory-growths, moulded by etiquette and classical culture and
home-law. And I fear he was right. Nearly all my Japanese friends are
dead. The last case was three or four days ago,--the sweetest of little
women,--a creature not seemingly of flesh and blood, but made of silk
embroidery mixed with soul. She was highly accomplished--one of my
wife's school friends. Married to a good man, but a man unable to care
for her as she ought to have been cared for. No force to bear children:
the pretty creature had never been too strong, and over-education had
strained her nerves. She ought never to have been married at all. She
knew she was dying, and came to bid us good-bye, laughing and lying
bravely. "I must go home," she said, "but I'll soon be well and come
back." She must have suffered terribly for more than a year--but she
never complained, never ceased to smile, never broke down. Died soon
after reaching home.
Another friend, a man, dying, tells his wife: "Open the windows
(_shōji_) wide, that my friend may see the chrysanthemums in the
garden." And he watches my face, laughing, while I pretend to be
pleased. The beauty of his soul is finer than any chrysanthemum, and it
is flitting. He wakes up in the night and calls: "Mother, did you hear
from my friend? is his son well?" Then he goes to sleep again--his last
words--for he is dead at sunrise. These lives are too fine and frail
for the brutal civilization that is going to crush them all out--every
one of them,--and prove to the future that sweetness is immoral _à la
Nietzsche_: that to be unselfish is to sentence one's self to death and
one's beloved to misery and probable extermination.
But then imagine beings who never, in their lives, did anything which
was not--I will not say "right," that is commonplace--any single thing
which was not _beautiful_! Should I write this the world would, of
course, call me a liar, as it has become accustomed to do. But I could
not now even write of them except to you--the wounds are raw.
I am thinking about Velvet Souls in general, and all ever known by me in
particular. Almost in every place where I lived long, it was given me to
meet a velvet soul or two--presences (male or female mattered nothing)
which with a word or look wrapped all your being round in a softness and
warmth of emotional caress inexpressible. "Velvet" isn't a good word.
The effect is more like the bath of tropical light and warmth to the
body of a sick voyager from lands of consumption and rheumatism. These
souls are intellectual in many cases, but that is not the interest of
them--the interest is purely emotional. A purely intellectual person is
unpleasant; and I fancy our religion is chiefly hateful because it makes
its gods of the intellectual kind now-a-days. I should like to write
about such souls--but how difficult. A queer thing for me is that in
memory _they unite_, without distinction of sex, into one divine type
of perfect tenderness and sympathy and knowledge,--like those Living
Creatures of Dante's Paradise composed of many different persons. I have
found such souls also in Japan--but only Japanese souls. But they are
melting into the night.