YAIDZU, August, 1902.
DEAR PROFESSOR,--Your kind letter of July 20th is with me....
I am so glad to hear that you are not likely to be obliged to leave
Europe. It is perhaps the greatest possible misfortune for a man of
culture to find himself obliged to withdraw from intellectual centres
to a new raw country, where the higher mental life is still imperfectly
understood. There are certain compensations, indeed,--such as larger
freedom, and release from useless conventions, but these do not fully
make up for the sterility of that American atmosphere in which the more
delicate flowers of thought refuse to grow. I am delighted to think of
your prospective pleasure in the Italian paradise.
I am writing to you from the little fishing-village of Yaidzu--where
there are no tables or chairs.
Bellesort's book is a surprisingly good book in its way. It describes
_only_ the disintegration of Japanese society--under the contact of
Western ideas--the social putrefaction, the _dégringolade_ of things. As
a book dealing with this single unpleasant phase of Japanese existence,
it is a very powerful book; and there are some touching pages in it.
It was I who gave Bellesort the story of the little boy who committed
suicide when falsely accused of stealing a cake,--and he made good use
of it.... I don't think that he is able to see the beautiful out of
conventional limits; and he mostly confines himself to the directions in
which he is strong. I am inclined to believe that his sympathies are
clerical--that he presents Brunetière and the Jesuit side of things.
However, his book is the best thing of its kind yet produced--the
critical kind. It requires a special nervous structure, like that of
Pierre Loti, to see the strange beauty of Japan. Let me, however, advise
you to read many times the charming book of the American, Percival
Lowell,--"The Soul of the Far East." It is strange that Lowell should
have written the very best book in the English language on the old
Japanese life and character, and the most startling _astronomical_ book
of the period,--"Mars,"--more interesting than any romance....