TŌKYŌ, May, 1899.
DEAR MRS. FENOLLOSA,--You will be shocked, I fear, when I tell you
that I was careless enough to lose the address given me in your last
charming letter. Your letters are too precious to be thus mislaid;
and I am ashamed of negligence in this case. But though I forgot the
address, I forgot no word of the letter,--nor of the previous charming
letter, with its quotation from that very clever friend of yours (Miss
Very)--the Emerson quotation from the Brahma-poem. I hope you will tell
me more about your friend some day; for she seems to be intellectually
my friend also. I liked very much what she said, as quoted by you,--who
know curiously well how to give pleasure, and do it so generously,
notwithstanding such meagre return.
I was struck by the paragraph in your last letter concerning the
_feeling_ of understanding a writer better than anybody else in the
whole world. You seemed to think it presumptuous to make such a
declaration about any writer; but the feeling, I believe, is always
_true_. I have it in regard to all my favourite authors,--especially
in regard to certain pages of French writers, like Anatole France,
Loti, Michelet, Gautier, Hugo. And I know I am right--though I never
can be a critic. The fact is that the greatest critics, each of them,
think likewise; and their criticisms prove them correct. No two feel or
appreciate an author in exactly the same way: each discerns a different
value in him. For no two personalities being the same, and no personal
understanding the same, the "equation" makes the judgement unique in
this world, and so incomparably valuable, when it is a large one....
The missionaries are furthermore wrong in sending women to
the old-fashioned districts. The people do not understand the
maiden-missionary, and if she receives a single foreign visitor not of
her own sex, the most extraordinary stories are set in circulation. Of
course, the people are not malicious in the matter; but they find such
a life contrary to all their own social experience, and they judge it
falsely in consequence.
For myself I could sympathize with the individual,--but never with the
missionary-cause. Unconsciously, every honest being in the mission-army
is a destroyer--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they
break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent
the edge--the _acies_, to use the Roman word--of Occidental aggression.
We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful and selfish
civilization demoralizing and crushing a weaker and, in many ways, a
nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and the spectacle
is not pretty. We must recognize the inevitable, the Cosmic Law, if you
like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and this perhaps blinds
one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by the "noble army."
...