Elizabeth Bisland

“ The vast blue light coloured everything,—walls, timbers, awnings, draperies, dresses of pilgrims; and the cherry-trees were one blaze of snowy blossoms; and the horizon was clear as crystal. In the distance towered Sanuki-Fuji,—a cone of amethyst in the light. I wished I could teach in some school at Kompira uchimachi, and stay there always.
I like little towns. To live at Tadotsu, or at Hishi-ura in Oki, or at Yunotsu in Iwami, or at Daikon-shimain Naka-umi, would fill my soul with joy. I cannot like the new Japan. ”

“ In every Western literature the stars have been called the eyes of the night; and still we call the sun the Eye of the Day, just as the Greeks did. Innumerable as are the stars of the night, they cannot be seen at all when the sun has well risen. They are not able to make light and joy in the world; and when the sun sets, everything becomes dark and colourless. Then the poet says that human love is to human life what the sun is to the world. It is not by reason, but by a feeling that we are made happy. The mind cannot make us happy as the heart can. ”

“ The man whose vision is vast enough can scarcely do more evil than a god. He cannot injure his world voluntarily without suffering from his own action. He must study his world as a naturalist his ant-hill. And even as a God he must feel the ultimate evil and good is not of him; but is being forever viewlessly woven in Shadow by the Fates of the Infinite,—whose distaff twists the thread of his own life, and whose will guides his own courses.
The great desire would be for the combination of emotion with knowledge, of philosophy with mathematics, of Plato with a Napoleon, or Spinoza with a Gould. ”

“ But—I cannot help thinking that you do not look for the highest,—that you miss a universe of beautiful things. The obtrusive, the eccentric, the sharply bitter, the “Distorted Souls” as you call them, naturally compel attention first,—just as in real life the forward, the selfish, the aggressive, force themselves upon us. It is of the highest possible value, as a means of self-preservation, to understand them. But I suspect that it is of no value at all to draw them, to photograph them, to give them artistic treatment except in a contrast-study. They are not beautiful. They are not good. ”

“ Intellectual societies are societies of artists, men of letters, philosophers, where absolute freedom of speech and action and dress are allowed. The polite society only delicately sniffs or nibbles at intellectual life, or else subordinates it to its fairy shows and transformation scenes. I don’t suppose for a moment that I am suggesting even the ghost of anything new,—but I wish only to suggest that I think (in view of all this) that nobody has ever, in English, dared to say what society really is as a system or display,—to cut boldly into the heart of things. ”

“ We live in the musky atmosphere of desire in the West;—an erotic perfume emanates from all that artificial life of ours;—we keep the senses perpetually stimulated with a million ideas of the eternal feminine; and our very language reflects the strain. The Western civilization is using all its arts, its sciences, its philosophy in stimulating and exaggerating and exacerbating the thought of sex. An Oriental would almost faint with astonishment and shame to see a Western ballet. ”

“ In this horrid Tōkyō I feel like a cicada:—I am caged, and can’t sing. Sometimes I wonder whether I shall ever be able to sing any more,—except at night?—like a bell-insect which has only one note.
What more and more impresses me every year is the degree to which the writer is a creature of circumstance. If he can make the circumstance, like a Kipling or a Stevenson, he can go on forever. Otherwise he is likely to exhaust every motive in short order, to the same extent that he depends on outer influence. ”

“ So are the Sirens, Circe, and the Sphinx and Herakles and Admetos and Alkestis. So are the Harpies, and Medusa, and the Fates who measure and cut and spin. But when I try, I find myself unable to create for want of a knowledge of every-day life,—that life which is the only life the general reader understands or cares about.
Then the philosophical fairy-tales might deal with personal experiences common to all men,—impulse and sorrow and loss and hope and discovery of the hollowness of things. But the inclination only is with me,—the pushing sensation,—the vague cloud-feeling of the thing. ”

“ If ever you become a father, I think the strangest and strongest sensation of your life will be hearing for the first time the thin cry of your own child. For a moment you have the strange feeling of being double; but there is something more, quite impossible to analyze—perhaps the echo in a man’s heart of all the sensations felt by all the fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the past. It is a very tender, but also a very ghostly feeling. ”

“ No man, as a general rule, shows his soul to another man; he shows it only to a woman,—and then only with the assurance that she won’t give him away. As a matter of fact, she can’t:—the Holy Ghost takes care of that! No woman unveils herself to another woman—only to a man; and what she unveils he cannot betray. He can only talk of her body, if he is brute enough to wish to: the inner being, of which he has had some glimpses, can be pictured only in a language which he cannot use. But what a fighting masked-ball the whole thing is!
Have you read Huxley’s views on Ethics and Evolution? ”

“ Whatever you believe, my dear Ochiai, you need never refuse to show respect to the tomb of an Emperor, to the memory of an ancestor, or the religion of another people or another country. Christianity teaches no such discourtesy. Only bigots teach it,—and even they teach it for reasons you are not able to understand. I do not want to question your religious belief at all;—that is not my duty. I want only to talk to you about social action in reference to real religion. No honest religion ought to cause you any unhappiness, or to cause you to be blamed by others. ”

“ And is it not essential that the woman-beauty of soul must be the lesser; for its scope must be limited by its eternal duty. We are in the presence, however, of the undeniable fact that we rarely get glimpses of the higher possibilities of the man-soul. Life is too hard and bitter. But in the twilight of every home one sees the woman-souls glowing like fireflies. We think only of the lights we see. The circling darknesses are opaque to us,—like burnt-out suns. ”

“ What I love in Japan is the Japanese,—the poor simple humanity of the country. It is divine. There is nothing in this world approaching the naïve natural charm of them. No book ever written has reflected it. And I love their gods, their customs, their dress, their bird-like quavering songs, their houses, their superstitions, their faults. ”

“ O ye Eight Hundred Myriads of Gods! What would you do if you were me. Lo! the illusion is gone!—Japan in Kyūshū is like Europe;—except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an educated Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. Here is an astounding fact. The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child—perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated, the further you push him from you. ”

“ Setsu and I both agree that Kōbe is warmer than Kyōto; but, except for the winter months, I should rather live in Kyōto than in any part of Japan. Tōkyō is the most horrible place in Japan, and I want to live in it just as short a time as possible. The weather is atrocious;—the earthquakes are fearsome;—the foreign element and the Japanese officialism of Tōkyō must be dreadful. I want to feel and see Japan: there is no Japan in Tōkyō. But in spite of all I say, Setsu thinks of Tōkyō just as a French lady thinks of Paris. ”

“ Bravery is noble only when the object is noble. As a quality, it is not peculiar to man at all;—a wild bull is braver than any general. It is very noble to sacrifice one’s life for a good cause—for love of parents, country, duty; but we ought not to admire the throwing away of life for an unjust cause. The real rule by which to measure what is admirable and what is despicable is the rule of Duty.
That is why I admire very, very much, all that was noble in the old Japanese life,—its moral code, its household religion, and its unselfishness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But I think you may not know that Inasa beach is in some respects the nicest bathing-place imaginable—certainly by far the best I have ever visited in Japan. The hotels face a beach without a pebble in its sand, and when the water is not rough, it is clear as a diamond; when roughened by a west wind, however, the water sometimes becomes dirty with seaweed, drift and such refuse. This is the great bathing resort of Izumo. But it is much more quiet and pleasant than other Japanese bathing resorts I have seen—such as Ōiso. ”

“ Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Kumamoto, May, 1894.
Dear Hendrick,—So far from your letters not being interesting, they are always full of interest—first, simply because they are your letters; secondly, because they tell the evolution of you—showing how, after all, we are made by the eternal forces. That you become a business man, in every sense of the word, is inevitable. It would be wrong if you did not. It would be wrong not to love your profession. The evil of becoming a business man exists only for small men—dries small men up. Surely you are not small! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is cultivating also, beyond any question, a capacity for tenderness the Orient knows nothing of. Tenderness is not of the Orient man. He is without brutality, but he is also without that immense reserve force of deep love and forgiving-power which even the rougher men of the West have. The Oriental is intellectually, rationally capable of all self-sacrifice and loyalty: he does the noblest and grandest things without even the ghost of a tender feeling. ”

“ The extraordinary wastefulness of foreign life is a fact that strikes one hard after life in the interior. Men work like slaves for no other earthly reason than that conventions require them to live beyond their means; and those who are free to live as they wish live on a scale that seems extravagant in the extreme. All goes right in the end, but I have not yet escaped the sensation of imagining one life devouring a hundred for mere amusement. ”

“ Probably next year I shall be leading a busier life; but I don’t know whether Japanese officialism can be endured for any great length of time. I had one dose of it too much already. The people are the best in the world; the military and naval men are men, and generally braves garçons....
The old men are divine: I do not know any other word to express what they are. When you meet a horrid Japanese, though, there is a distorted quality about him that makes him a unique monster—he is like an awry caricature of a Western mean fellow, without the vim and push—solid contemptibility in petto. ”

“ Perhaps it will interest you to know the effect of Japanese life upon your little friend after the experiences of a year and a half. At first, the sense of existence here is like that of escaping from an almost unbearable atmospheric pressure into a rarefied, highly oxygenated medium. That feeling continues: in Japan the law of life is not as with us,—that each one strives to expand his own individuality at the expense of his neighbour’s. ”

“ The tyranny of the future must be that of Organization: the monopoly, the trust, the combination, the associated company—representing supremely perfect mathematical unification of Law, Order, and System. Much more powerful than the robber-baron, or Charlemagne, or Barbarossa, these are infinitely less human,—having no souls, etc. (What would be the use of souls!—souls only waste time.) Business is exact and dangerous and powerful like a colossal dynamo: it is the extreme of everything men used to pray for,—and it is not what they did not pray for. ”

“ But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home—in which happy generations have been. Then how much dead love lives again, and how many ecstasies of the childhoods of a hundred years must revive! We do not all die,—said the ancient wise man. How much of us dies is an unutterable mystery.
Science is rather provoking here. She tells us we are advancing toward equilibration, to be followed by dissolution, to be succeeded by another evolution, to end in another disintegration—and so on forever. ”

“ Here in Japan, I watch, day by day, the destruction of a wonderful and very beautiful civilization, by industrial pressure. It strikes me that a time is approaching in which intellectual liberty will almost cease to exist, together with every other kind of liberty,—the time when no man will be able to live as he wishes, much less to write what he pleases. The future industrial communism, in its blind dull way, will be much less liberal than Russian rule, and incomparably more cruel. ”

“ Kōbe, January, 1895.
Dear Hendrick:—Three books and a catalogue reached me—Mallock, Kipling, and a volume by Morris—for which more than thanks the value much exceeding, I fear, the slight difference between us.
It now seems to me that time is the most precious of all things conceivable. I can’t waste it by going out to hear people talk nonsense,—or by going to see pretty girls whom I can’t marry, being married already,—or by playing games of cards, etc., to kill time,—or by answering letters written me by people who have neither real fine feeling nor real things to say. ”

“ As her pursuer grows more old, she becomes ever more young and fair. He waits for her through the years,—waits till his hair is grey. Then,—wifeless, childless, blasé, ennuyé, cynical, misanthropic,—he looks in the glass and finds that he has been cheated out of youth and life. But does he give up the chase? No!—the hair of Lilith—just one—has been twisted round his heart,—an ever-tightening fine spider-line of gold. And he sees her smile just ere he passes into the Eternal darkness. ”