IN THE ORIENT
PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N.
AND
BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ.
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOLOGY AND
JAPANESE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY
OF TOKYO
I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES
IN TOKEN OF
AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE

Then came a sudden break.

After Hearn's death, Chamberlain, in discussing the subject, lamented
"the severance of a connection with one so gifted." He made one or two
attempts at renewal of intercourse, which were at first met with cold
politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing him to desist from
further endeavours. The key, perhaps, to Hearn's course of action, is to
be found in some observations that he addresses to Professor Chamberlain
just before the close of their friendship. They had been in
correspondence on the subject of the connection of the tenets of
Buddhism and scientific expositions of evolutionary science in England.

"Dear Chamberlain: In writing to you, of course, I have not been writing
a book, but simply setting down the thoughts and feelings of the moment
as they come....

"I write a book exactly the same way; but all this has to be smoothed,
ordinated, corrected, toned over twenty times before a page is ready....
I cannot help fearing that what you mean by 'justice and temperateness'
means that you want me to write as if I were you, or at least to measure
sentence or thought by your standard.... If I write well of a thing one
day, and badly another, I expect my friend to discern that both
impressions are true, and solve the contradiction--that is, if my
letters are really wanted."

The fact is that, if Hearn took up a philosophic or scientific opinion,
he was determined to make all with whom he held converse share them, and
if they did not do so at once, like the despotic oriental monarch, he
would overturn the chessboard.

"The rigid character of his philosophical opinions," says Chamberlain,
"made him perforce despise as intellectual weaklings all those who did
not share them, or shared them in a lukewarm manner, and his
disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to
find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable."

It was principally during the last fourteen years of his life that Hearn
acquired th