Talk:Basil Hall Chamberlain
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[edit] Letters from Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn
Chamberlain and Lafcadio Hearn were friends and despite a lifetime spent in Japan, were both enchanted and frustrated at the same time by their experiences there. Both men experienced discrimination and this led to changes in their writing styles where they expressed these frustrations. As i recall Hearn was paid (at a lower rate) despite being a naturalized citizen, marrying a Japanese woman and adopting a Japanese name. This affected him and his attitudes towards the end of his life. Chamberlain also experienced similar situations. Chamberlain complained in his personal correspondence and he wrote about Japanese society with a critical viewpoint:
The most sober statement of his own convictions comes from a letter written to Hearn in 1891:
I have myself gone through many phases of opinion, but the net result is that they appear to me far inferior to the European race ・at once less profound, less tender, and less imaginative. Much of what strikes one as originality at first is only, so to say, a relative originality as compared with Europe; after a time one finds out either that the thing, whatever it may be was borrowed from China, or else perhaps that, though superficially pretty, it is not really worth so much as the corresponding thing in the West. Take poetry, for instance. It is perhaps the best instance. I threw myself with the greatest ardour into Japanese poetry, even to the length of trying to compose it. I read practically all, from the Many・i>sh・downwards, and I now see that all of it together hardly contains so much imaginative power as half-a-dozen of Wordsworth sonnets. There is a dryness, a jejuneness in all Japanese thought. All this is very sad to write, and I would not write it publicly, for the reason that many would ascribe the adverse judgement to other motives than dispassionate comparison. Each man must go through the successive stages in his own person. On the other hand, how absolutely the most charming of all countries Japan is to live in, ・how delightful the scenery, how safe the roads, how kind everywhere the welcome, how easy the life! These things must be weighed in the balance against the absence of that greater imagination which has been the root of all our European achievements alike in literature, science, and social life.3
Such a statement should be seen in the light of Hearn's own somewhat uncritical enthusiasm for a Japan that, at this early stage, he himself understood only very imperfectly and would have understood even less had it not been for Chamberlain friendship and advice; but it is a good illustration of the kind of candour that makes one trust the author: he was always scrupulously fair to his own feelings and judgements. A later letter to Hearn, dated May 1894, contains the following: I care little for the Europeans here. Barring a few real friends ・Mason and half a dozen more ・ they seem to me to be deteriorated by their surroundings. Brinkley and all that lot disgust me by their sycophancy of the Japanese. Besides them there are the diplomats; but they look down on common folk. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.6.204.111 (talk) 06:38, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
