Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools Part 39

Your generous praise makes me rather shamefaced: you ought to keep it for something that counts. At least other people ought: you would find a bright ringing word, and the proportion of things would be kept. As for me, I am doing my best to keep the proportion of things, in the midst of no-standards and a dreary dingy fog-expanse of darkened counsel. Bah!

here I am whining in my third sentence, and the purpose of this note was not to whine, but to thank you for heart new-taken. I take the friendly words (for I need them cruelly) and forget the inadequate occasion of them. I am looking forward with almost feverish pleasure to the new year, when I shall be among friends.h.i.+ps which time and absence and half-estrangements have only made to s.h.i.+ne with a more inward light; and when, so accompanied, I can make s.h.i.+ft to think and live a little. Do not wait till then to say Welcome.

W.V.M.

BRET HARTE TO HIS WIFE

LAWRENCE, KANSAS, October 24, 1873.

MY DEAR ANNA,--

I left Topeka--which sounds like a name Franky might have invented--early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o'clock at night--an hour before the lecture. The engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o'clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight. But I got a saddle-horse--there was no vehicle to be had--and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy--who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure--with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards Atchison. I got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after.

I make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted man who glared at that audience over his desk that night.... And yet it was a good audience, thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. I was very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and I had been told that Atchison was a rough place--energetic but coa.r.s.e. I think I wrote you from St. Louis that I had found there were only three actual engagements in Kansas, and that my list which gave Kansas City twice was a mistake. So I decided to take Atchison. I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for yourself, Nan, to buy "Minxes" with, if you want, for it is over and above the amount Eliza and I footed up on my lecture list. I shall send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are settled.

Everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night I have one more to close Kansas, and then I go on to St. Joseph. I've been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which these Western people seem to have for me. They seem to have read everything I have written--and appear to appreciate the best. Think of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue s.h.i.+rt repeating to me _Concepcion de Arguello_! Their strange good taste and refinement under that rough exterior--even their tact--are wonderful to me. They are "Kentucks" and "d.i.c.k Bullens" with twice the refinement and tenderness of their California brethren....

I've seen but one [woman] that interested me--an old negro wench. She was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but her laugh was so sweet and unctuous and musical--so full of breadth and goodness that I went outside and talked to her while she was scrubbing the stones. She laughed as a canary bird sings--because she couldn't help it. It did me a world of good, for it was before the lecture, at twilight, when I am very blue and low-toned. She had been a slave.

I expected to have heard from you here. I've nothing from you or Eliza since last Friday, when I got yours of the 12th. I shall direct this to Eliza's care, as I do not even know where you are.

Your affectionate FRANK.

LAFCADIO HEARN TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN

[k.u.mAMOTO, j.a.pAN]

January 17, 1893.

DEAR CHAMBERLAIN,--

I'm writing just because I feel lonesome; isn't that selfish? However, if I can amuse you at all, you will forgive me. You have been away a whole year,--so perhaps you would like to hear some impressions of mine during that time. Here goes.

The illusions are forever over; but the memory of many pleasant things remains. I know much more about the j.a.panese than I did a year ago; and still I am far from understanding them well. Even my own little wife is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way. Of course a man and woman know each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand. Let me tell one. In Oki we fell in love with a little Samurai boy, who was having a hard time of it, and we took him with us. He is now like an adopted son,--goes to school and all that. Well, I wished at first to pet him a little, but I found that was not in accordance with custom, and that even the boy did not understand it. At home, I therefore scarcely spoke to him at all; he remained under the control of the women of the house. They treated him kindly,--though I thought coldly. The relations.h.i.+p I could not quite understand. He was never praised and rarely scolded. A perfect code of etiquette was established between him and all the other persons in the house, according to degree and rank. He seemed extremely cold-mannered, and perhaps not even grateful, that was, so far as I could see. Nothing seemed to move his young placidity,--whether happy or unhappy his mien was exactly that of a stone Jizo. One day he let fall a little cup and broke it. According to custom, no one noticed the mistake, for fear of giving him pain.

Suddenly I saw tears streaming down his face. The muscles of the face remained quite smilingly placid as usual, but even the will could not control tears. They came freely. Then everybody laughed, and said kind things to him, till he began to laugh too. Yet that delicate sensitiveness no one like me could have guessed the existence of.

But what followed surprised me more. As I said, he had been (in my idea) distantly treated. One day he did not return from school for three hours after the usual time. Then to my great surprise, the women began to cry,--to cry pa.s.sionately. I had never been able to imagine alarm for the boy could have affected them so. And the servants ran over town in real, not pretended, anxiety to find him. He had been taken to a teacher's house for something relating to school matters. As soon as his voice was heard at the door, everything was quiet, cold, and amiably polite again. And I marvelled exceedingly.

Sensitiveness exists in the j.a.panese to an extent never supposed by the foreigners who treat them harshly at the open ports.... The j.a.panese master is never brutal or cruel. How j.a.panese can serve a certain cla.s.s of foreigners at all, I can't understand....

This Orient knows not our deeper pains, nor can it even rise to our larger joys; but it has its pains. Its life is not so sunny as might be fancied from its happy aspect. Under the smile of its toiling millions there is suffering bravely hidden and unselfishly borne; and a lower intellectual range is counterbalanced by a childish sensitiveness to make the suffering balance evenly in the eternal order of things.

Therefore I love the people very much, more and more, the more I know them....

And with this, I say good-night.

Ever most truly, LAFCADIO HEARN.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

SHADY HILL, 2 May, 1902.

"The Kentons" have been a great comfort to me. I have been in my chamber, with a slight attack of illness, for two or three weeks, and I received them one morning. I could not have had kinder or more entertaining visitors, and I was sorry when, after two or three days, I had to say Good-bye to them. They are very "natural" people, "just Western." I am grateful to you for making me acquainted with them.

"Just Western" is the acme of praise. I think I once told you what pleasure it gave me as a compliment. Several years ago at the end of one of our Christmas Eve receptions, a young fellow from the West, taking my hand and bidding me Good-night, said with great cordiality, "Mr. Norton, I've had a delightful time; it's been _just Western_"!

"The Kentons" is really, my dear Howells, an admirable study of life, and as it was read to me my chief pleasure in listening was in your sympathetic, creative imagination, your insight, your humour, and all your other gifts, which make your stories, I believe, the most faithful representations of actual life that were ever written. Other stories seem unreal after them, and so when we had finished "The Kentons,"

nothing would do for entertainment but another of your books: so now we are almost at the end of "Silas Lapham," which I find as good as I found it fifteen or sixteen years ago. As Gray's idea of pleasure was to lie on a sofa and have an endless succession of stories by Crebillon,--mine is to have no end of Howells!...

NOTES

Letter from William Vaughn Moody:--

=darkened counsel=:--See Job, 38:2. Moody seems to be referring here to the uncertainty of his plans for the future.

Letter from Bret Harte:--

=Franky=:--Francis King Harte, Bret Harte's second son, who was eight years old at this time.

=Concepcion de Arguello=:--One of Bret Harte's longer poems.

=Kentuck=:--A rough but kindly character in Harte's _The Luck of Roaring Camp_.

=d.i.c.k Bullen=:--The chief character in _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_.

=Frank=:--Bret Harte's name was Francis Brett Hart(e), and his family usually called him Frank.

Letter from Lafcadio Hearn:--

=Chamberlain=:--Professor Chamberlain had lived for some years in j.a.pan, when Hearn, in 1890, wrote to him, asking a.s.sistance in securing a position as teacher in the j.a.panese Government Schools. The friends.h.i.+p between the two men continued until Hearn's death.

=Samurai=:--p.r.o.nounced _sa' m[)oo] r[=i]_; a member of the lesser n.o.bility of j.a.pan.

=Jizo=:--A j.a.panese G.o.d, said to be the playmate of the ghosts of children. Stone images of Jizo are common in j.a.pan. (See page 19 of _The j.a.panese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn_.)